


Tell No Tales

by Mundivore



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Connie As Perspective Character, Fluff (later on and in flashback scenes), Hurt/Comfort, Mild Horror, Mind Manipulation, POV First Person, Temporary Character Death, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-04-30 11:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14495610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mundivore/pseuds/Mundivore
Summary: After being turned by a vampire to further a petty agenda, no longer capable of trusting their own mind, most people would give up.Most people aren't monster-hunters named Connie Maheswaran. Even from beyond her early grave, she carries on.--Starts after Jungle Moon but before Can't Go Back.





	1. Dead End

_ -a moment in the past- _

 

A quiet breeze brushed across the arena, cooling the sweat on my brow. Pearl laughed as she fell onto a seat. I sat down next to her, and took a long drink from a bottle of water.

“Connie, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you could go toe-to-toe with any gem on Homeworld!” She spent a few moments radiant in her boast, then peeked slyly at me, like she was sharing a secret. “You know… one of the advantages I had over other gems in combat—especially early in the war—was simply that most gems designed for combat didn’t practice. After all, if you’re built to fight from the instant you emerge, you might simply assume you could never lose. But while a fighter’s instincts will get you so far…”

She motioned for me to complete her thought.

“It’s not exactly a substitute for proper technique,” I guessed.

“Precisely. Now don’t get me wrong, you’ll be at a great disadvantage to most gems built for combat, and even many who aren’t. Fighting a gem is more likely to get you in trouble than anything else, and even as you get better at swordplay, practice won’t make you invincible. For now, you’re still a child.”

I itched at my arm a little. Somehow, that didn’t satisfy me.

“What if I have to fight a gem?” I asked on impulse. “On my own, right now? What should I do?”

Pearl blinked.

“Well, that’s odd. Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t want to, but—”

“Good!” She clapped her hands. “No issue. Just don’t do it!”

“No!” I shook my head, agitated. “No, I mean, what should I do if I’m just walking home from school or something, and a gem just shows up and attacks me? Completely hypothetical.”

“Well, that depends on the gem in question! For instance—”

“I have no clue. No idea. Just a random gem shows up, someone who’s stronger than me, and I have to fight. Like Topaz. How do I fight when I don’t know what I’m fighting, or when I’m at a disadvantage?”

There was near silence as I waited for her answer, not a sound but the gentle hint of air and cloud against the sky arena. Eventually, Pearl sighed.

“I’m afraid there’s not a perfect solution,” Pearl said. “Nothing that will fit for every situation, anyway. No tricks to it. More or less, you should stick to fundamentals, but tenacity is the thing that should be emphasized. Even when victory seems impossible, a gap in your opponent’s defenses could appear, or reinforcements could arrive when you least expect it, or you might be presented a chance to escape. So take every inch of ground, seize on every weakness, pass up no opportunities, and never give in.”

She chuckled.

“There have been moments when I thought or known that  I’d lost, but if I’d have given up then, I wouldn’t be here. Believing in yourself and in your friends… that’s what really carries you through those fights.”

“So… fight hard, and hope for luck and backup?” I summarized, with a grin.

Pearl ruffled at my hair a bit—I laughed as I waved my hands in her direction, mock-fighting her off.

 

_ -present- _

 

“Alright, Connie! See you later!” Steven waved goodbye over the pink fluff of Lion’s mane. “Okay, buddy. Let’s go!”

Lion sniffed at the air, then snarled.

“Woah!” I stepped back. “Is uh, Lion okay?”

“I don’t know!” Steven leaned forward to look down at him. “What’s bothering you, huh buddy?”

Lion growled again, stepping between me and my front door. He surveyed the area around us warily.

“Huh,” I said. “I guess he doesn’t want me going home?”

“Yeah. That’s weird.” Steven peeked  over Lion’s mane towards the house. “Maybe something’s scaring him there? If you’ve got a fire going in the fireplace, that could be it. He doesn’t always like fires.”

“No, my parents usually don’t use the fireplace. Especially not when it’s barely cold out.”

I looked about the neighborhood in the springtime dusk, looking for anything out of place, but eventually all I could come back to was Lion. I prodded him for input, but all I got in return was a disgruntled huff.

“Lion, it’s fine. There’s nothing in my house that could hurt me. My parents are like, total clean-freaks. There aren’t even sharp corners for me to stub my toes on!”

I tried my best to step around him, but he put his paw down in my path, meeting my eyes with a huff.

Steven glanced down, then back towards her house. “Maybe he’s lonely, and just really wants you to stay with him?”

“I don’t think that’s it. He’d be clinging to you, then.”

“Hey!” Steven protested. “He likes you too!”

“Well, yeah,” I said with a giggle, “But really, he’s your lion.”

Lion sniffed approvingly.

“Look,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes. “I’ll be fine. I just got back from  _ sword practice. _ If there’s anyone there, I’ll be able to fight back! Plus, I’ll have my mom and dad both there to help me. My dad’s basically a cop, so you know he’s tough, and moms are always tougher than dads, so I’m basically fine.”

“I don’t know the numbers on that one, but it sounds right to me,” Steven commented. “My mom was definitely tougher than my dad.”

Lion didn’t seem to react to anything I said, but when I moved to pass him this time, he didn’t get in my way.

“Thank you!” I patted Lion on the nose as I walked past.

“Hey, uh, Connie?” Steven called out to me. “I’m uh… I’m actually a bit nervous. Lion usually doesn’t get scared like this over nothing.”

“I’ll be fine, Steven. I’ll text you if I run into any problems.”

“Right. Right! Got it. I uh… Welp! Bye again, then!” Steven waved as I reached my porch. I turned and tried the door. As long as my mom wasn’t doing night shifts, she was usually home at about the same time I was. My dad would be home, since he usually worked late hours, leaving in the deep evening and working through the night. So, as usual, the door was unlocked, and I walked in freely.

“Hey Mom, hey Dad!” I shut the door behind me. “I’m back from training!”

The curtains were drawn tight and the lights were turned down low, leaving the house gloomy and dark. I squinted to make out the room as my eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness. My dad sat uncannily straight on the couch, unnaturally bereft of movement.

“Dad?” 

No response. I reached for my sword and approached.

“Dad?” I asked again, more quietly. His posture was calm and conducted, head and neck straight forward but his eyes—they trembled as I came closer, panicked and uncertain. His brow was slick with sweat. Holding a finger up in front of him, I moved it left to right, and though it took him a second to focus in on it, his eyes followed it perfectly.

A thrill ran up my spine. This wasn’t right. Something was seriously wrong here.

Dad started moving his eyes rapidly. Multiple quick flicks of his eyes in the direction of the kitchen. After a few, he’d refocus in on me. He was trying to tell me something. A message? No, a warning.

Something was seriously wrong here, and it was in the kitchen.

I had already announced my presence, so it knew I was here. If there was a fight, I’d be at a disadvantage—better to retreat and regroup with Steven and Lion than to try and surprise the intruder. I drew my sword and turned to make a break for the door, but I was too late. A figure loomed out from the kitchen’s entrance. Even at distance and in dim lighting, her eyes were striking for their intensity and yellow color, framed by hair black as soot.

“Welcome home.” The voice was a woman’s, but most certainly not my mother’s. It had a rasp not unlike that of a heavy smoker, and there was a preening smugness to the tone.

“What are you—”

“Shush. Be quiet, and stay still.” 

The woman waved her hand dismissively and silence fell over the room, my words dead in my mouth. My motion, frozen in its tracks. I was left with nothing but the pounding of my heart. Sharp footsteps carried her closer to me, and while I did my best to observe her, something about her gaze kept my eyes from drifting too far for long. I took note of what I could. She wore a large, dark overcoat, and jeans that were somehow both too thin and too wrinkled at the same time. Between how she jangled like a glass jar full of socks and loose change, and the swaying of her overheavy coat, I could only guess she was carrying a great number of metal tools in her coat. I chose to assume they were knives, because that seemed like the sort of thing a home invader would be most likely to have.

But as my focus was fixed upon her eyes, it was her eyes which I could study best. 

I didn’t like what I saw. 

They were not the eyes of a human, though they might once have been. Now, though, they were yellowed, tinged with hunger, with madness, with greed. Not the eyes of a woman, but the eyes of a savage animal. 

The eyes of a Beast.

I refocused on trying to find a way out. That the Beast could compel me to act against my will was immediately obvious, and if I was incapable of breaking eye contact, it seemed also likely that the compulsion was somehow related to the control. If I broke the gaze, would I regain control of my actions?

My father, frozen on the couch, seemed to suggest that wasn’t the case. He’d have tried to escape by now, or have made greater effort to warn me. Maybe the Beast was limited to giving commands while there was eye contact, or maybe the eye contact was an enhancement mechanism, but the results of a command clearly could last further than the duration of the gaze.

Outside, Lion roared, the sound of him and Steven portaling out. I cursed my luck internally—my opportunity to get their attention had lapsed, and now I was left dealing with this problem on my own.

The Beast finished her advance, and crouched down in front of me, a toothy grin splitting across her face. Too toothy—while discolored from lack of care, her canines were unnaturally, uncomfortably long and prominent. I wrinkled my nose in disgust as she leaned in, bringing a foul odor with her.

“Get out of my face,” I muttered reflexively.

The Beast leaned backwards, eyes widening. She leaned in and gave a ragged gasp before speaking, like she’d forgotten to breathe in earlier.

“I thought I’d told you to stay quiet.”

So she had. Perhaps if I could not disobey her orders, I could still find ways to misinterpret them? I suppressed a slight smile. A mutter was quiet, after all. Could I circumvent her order to stay still, then?

The Beast leaned back and laughed headily.

“You’re something else, aren’t you?” she said, with the cruel fascination of a middle schooler examining a caged animal. She laughed again, the laugh petering off as she carried on like a tire running out of air. She dropped back to my eye level before she sucked in enough breath to continue, a rasping and mouthy gasp. 

“So clever. I absolutely love being right. Tell me, your name.”

My mouth contorted as I tried to avoid saying the words.

“ **Connie Maheswaran,** ” I spat. “Let me and my parents go.”

A snort of laughter like the tie undone on a balloon.

“Or else, what?”

Another sense of compulsion, to speak, to answer. “The Gems,” were the obvious answer. They’d make sure to catch her for whatever she did. But if I told her that, she’d know more, and I didn’t want that. So this time, I took the compulsion, and I twisted it.

“Or else,  **you’ll be in trouble.** ” I smiled grimly at her. Technically, I had answered. I wasn’t lying. My answer yielded even more wheezing laughter, and I recoiled as her breath broke the smell of decay across my face.

“You are exactly as smart as I hoped you’d be,” she said after she finally recovered. I got another up-close view on her teeth (they didn’t even look human!) as she gloated. “Smart enough to be a pain, to dodge about the corners, means that you’re smart enough to be useful later. I like useful.”

“You’re a monster,” I retorted. “Stop this. This is sick.”

The Beast sniffed derisively. “Pish-posh. Humans are ruled by biology anyway—you’ve got as much decision-making power now than you’ve ever had.”

“Your compatriot,” she carried on. “The short one, with the lion. Does he have any way to track you, if we leave this place?”

“ **No,** ” the answer came to my mouth. I grimaced. True to the best of my knowledge—the closest Steven had told me about was his dream-walking abilities, and even that would only let him see my surroundings, not know where I was.

Which was problematic. I couldn’t fight the Beast alone, that much was clear. I needed either to escape to the Gems, or get them to come to me—anything else would have to be left as a last-ditch effort. How could I achieve either of those ends?

“Tell me, child, do you think he could best me in battle?”

She was proud of her abilities, and yet she was asking for validation from a total stranger. Narcissism. Another mark against her character, if home invasion and mind control weren’t enough.

“ **No clue.** ” If I had no choice over whether or not to speak, I’d continue give the most information-limiting answer I could.

“Elaborate,” she ordered, frowning. 

“ **Don’t know how good you are at fighting.** ” Which was a great way of saying that I didn’t know if her powers would let her beat Steven despite his powers, without telling her that he had any powers.

The Beast hummed in thought, running a dirty hand through her pitch-black hair. Almost as an afterthought, she whispered to me.

“Do mind, I allow your impudence solely for my own entertainment. Your attempts at rebellion do little more than amuse me.”

I strongly considered spitting at her feet, but decided it might buy me more trouble than it was worth. Barely.

I analyzed my options. Escape looked increasingly out of the question. Feral eyes watched me with unceasing, twisted interest. Contacting the gems, on the other hand, was comparatively simple—Steven had already been wary when he left, and a suspicious call or message would likely bring him back. Lion had an uncanny way of finding things, and if Steven was suspicious enough to bring the Gems, my chances would improve considerably. They could cover a lot of ground in a short time, and Garnet in particular was well-suited to finding me. 

The weight of the phone in my pocket grew heavier—protecting it, and finding a moment to use it, that would be my number one priority. 

A wheeze preempted the Beast’s speaking.

“Hm. No reason to expect he won’t stay concerned. I don’t want him randomly showing back up to check on you while we’re indisposed.” A chill ran down my back. Somehow, I got the impression that I didn’t especially want to find out what she wanted to do with me. “Dusk has fallen. We’re going. You will follow me, without making any incident. You will look at me as I speak to you. You will remain as inconspicuous as possible. You will not make any attempt to escape. Nod if you understand.”

Jerkily, my head bobbed. 

“And put away that sword,” the Beast snapped before walking to the door. “It’s bothering me. Who makes a pink sword, honestly?”

I scowled and stowed my blade as, trudgingly, I moved to follow her. Experimentally, I walked more to the right, and more to the left, and even back a few steps, and found that I had freedom of movement. However, the second I thought I might commit to running to the kitchen—perhaps to the back yard, perhaps to try to use the house phone—my limbs seized up. The Beast opened the door and stepped unperturbed into the deep blue of evening, turning back to face me. 

“Catch up, then,” she called to me, and my steps became brisk and robotic in response. 

As I took the final step out of the house, I turned back to look at my dad. The light was poor, but I thought I saw a glimmer of reflected light dropping silently from his face.

The Beast didn’t bother to close the door behind us as we left.

-

My heart raced. One street had passed, then two, three, four, and all the while I had been waiting for the perfect moment. It struck after we crossed Ashbrook Street, turning left to walk aside the river for which the street was named. A couple was coming down the street, jogging in our direction, and they were my window of opportunity.

I couldn’t, unfortunately, flag them down to ask for help. The Beast’s words (‘You will remain as inconspicuous as possible’) were uncomfortably clear in my head. Signaling them would, by nature, be conspicuous. However, as they approached, they consumed the Beast’s valuable attention. She glared ahead at them, monitoring them, and as she did so she didn’t seem to notice as I fell two, three, four steps behind her. I couldn’t stop following her—not that I hadn’t tried earlier, stumbling about in an attempt to contramand her order—but there was a gap even in the breadth of “you will not make any attempt to escape.”

Calling in super-powered aliens to save me wasn’t an attempt to escape: it was an attempt to defeat her. I was comfortably within the scope of those orders as I took my phone out of my pocket and quietly turned it on. The half second between the button being pressed and the screen lighting up felt entirely too long.

The couple approached, entering the distance that I could begin to pick out their conversation—and, that they could hear ours. Now, if the Beast wanted to say anything to me, they would overhear it. My safe zone.

I navigated to my texts, to Steven’s number. The Beast faltered a little, then increased her pace, a noticeable fraction—she couldn’t have noticed, could she?

I started with the most important information. Why I was in danger, and what from.

 

_ Kdnpd by mind control lady _

 

The couple passed us at speed. Why did they have to be jogging?

 

_ help. _

 

Their conversation began to fade.

“Girl,” the Beast said.

Was she speaking to me? Understanding whether or not was important to following her order. “You will look at me as I speak to you.” I didn’t know for certain—what if she was talking to one of the people who passed? In that ambiguity, I resisted looking away from the text.

My hope wavered—my brief window of safety was over, and inexplicably, the Beast seemed to already know what was going on. Did she know? No, I wouldn’t assume that she didn’t.  _ How _ did she know? How  _ could _ she know? Did she have eyes in the back of her head? I needed more time! Steven needed to know where I was, or the text was half in vain!

 

_ Ash _

 

“Connie!” The Beast snapped. No deniability, she was speaking to me. I clenched my teeth as I tried to resist looking at her, but to no avail. I peered up. Yellow eyes glared down at me.

“Throw that in the water.”

The sound of Ashbrook at my side was suddenly deafening. My best hope, out the window. I couldn’t look away from her, so I thumbed desperately at where I thought the send button was as I made to wind up for the throw.

“Now!” The Beast hissed. My limbs began to move against my will. I drew the phone back and down, and tossed it, sending it spinning and tumbling up. I tried to give it as much height as possible on the throw, giving it as much time to send as possible, but my heart was heavy. I had no clue if my text would actually get through. The Beast laughed as the phone landed with a little “plip” in the water.

“What a nasty child!” She shook her head. “Not polite to be on one of those while you’re spending time with someone.”

“It’s not polite to kidnap someone,” I interjected, scowling back up at her. She smiled at me darkly, and continued.

“Tell me who you were contacting.”

“ **Steven,** ” I said, my voice cracking a bit. Composure, composure! I needed a new plan, even if that boiled down to just waiting for luck and friends.

“The boy with the lion?”

She cackled as I nodded.

“I’m not sure where you got off thinking that him swooping you away on that garish pink cat of his didn’t count as some sort of escape,” she said, turning to continue walking. “But I think you’ll find your efforts in vain. We’ll be well out of sight soon enough.”

I reviewed my options as my legs robotically marched me after her. Escape was out of the question. I had no clue if I’d be getting help or not, and even if I assumed it was on its way I had no idea when or if they’d find me. That left me with two options I had available overall—fight, or stall for time.

Fighting now was out of the option for now, as I had been ordered to remain inconspicuous. That just meant I couldn’t attack her until we were out of plain sight. So I decided I’d stall for time. I took one step for every four she took, until she hurried me on, at which point I did my best to take one for every three—but stalling only did so much. It took little effort on her part to speed me up, and it seemed that at the time I had made my attempt to signal for help, we had only been perhaps a block from our destination.

The Beast diverged from the path right before we reached a bridge, taking us down the side of the steep riverbank. We stopped underneath the bridge, and she took us into a small hollow in the side of the dirt wall under the bridge. Quarters were uncomfortably close—the Beast had to bow her head slightly to fit inside, and it extended maybe a meter to a meter and a half back, at most. She pointed at the back of the hollow.

“Stand there,” she wheezed. Her smile was uncomfortably wide, and she seemed nearly to bounce in anticipation of… something. Adrenaline flooded my body once again, heart pounding. Something was about to happen, and whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good for me. I had to stop it, or delay it.

If I stalled for time now, it wasn’t likely to stop me from fighting later—likely, she figured that she’d be able to disable me quickly, or simply hadn’t thought of ordering me not to attack her. If I fought now, it was quite likely that I’d have more trouble stalling for time later, since her disabling me could result in me being injured or ordered into some kind of submission.

“How…” I muttered at first, not quite sure where I was going. “How did you know?”

“Hm?” The Beast grinned. Horrible, unsettling, but good for me—if I could fuel her ego, it might buy me time. Seconds, or minutes, or more, if I was lucky.

“I have good hearing,” she boasted. “Very good.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “Nobody’s hearing is that good.”

“Ah,” Her grim chuckle was slightly undercut by the wheeze that preceded it. “Then I suppose I am Nobody.”

She began to reach into her overcoat. I decided that was bad. I tried to distract her.

“What do you want from me?” I stammered a little in saying it. It didn’t sound like manipulation, because I was able to ask it with all the desperation and uncertainty it deserved. Because I  _ was _ desperate. I was desperate, I was scared, I was uncertain, and I wanted to know what she wanted just as much as I wanted her to not have it. And maybe, just maybe, I could get a bit more time out of it.

She drew her hand from her overcoat, and looked at me as if I was out of my mind.

“Are you serious?” The Beast crossed her arms, somewhere between sneering and grinning. Smirk didn’t cut it—it was a meaner expression. “And I thought you were clever. What a disappointment.”

The comment might have stung if I weren’t already in such a tough position. As it was, I was grateful for her theatrics—more time, more time. To plan, to think. From here, how should I attack? I was backed into the corner… Maybe she’d continue?

“I… I just want to know,” I muttered, my voice tired, afraid. How long could I string her along like this?

“It it not obvious? The Lion!” She half-shrieked, half-squeaked. “It… it’s pink! It’s domesticated! It makes portals!”

She stared at me, manic. “I need it. I need to know more. I need that lion. I need its magic. To get it, I need its loyalty. To get that, I need the loyalty of its owner. To get his loyalty,” she pointed down at me. “I need you.”

A few seconds passed as I thought on it. Fear turned to exasperation, to anger.

“That’s it? You want  _ Lion _ ? That’s… why didn’t you even try to ask? Why on Earth is your first instinct to kidnap someone?”

“I want the Lion, child. I want the Lion, I want the child who tamed it, and I want you… because you get me those things.” She leaned in, leeringly. “And when I want something, I take it.”

“You’re mad. I’ll never help you,” I rebutted.

The Beast cackled as she reached back into her overcoat.

“You say that, even with me having brought you here?”

I stared her down. Test me, I wanted to say. Give it a try. I’d find the way through your words, and bring your plan to pieces about you.

“You’re right, though,” she conceded with a sigh. “You’re too clever, and beyond that the task is too large. Even if I were to stay here, conditioning you for two, three, four hours, I don’t think I’d get what I wanted. You’d find a hole somewhere, the boy would catch wise, and you’d be detained in some way until you wormed your way out of all my orders. No good.”

She drew an odd object from her coat. An ornate cup—if it were larger, I’d say goblet, but it was fairly modest in size—made of steel, or maybe tin. An intimidating spike rose out of the center of the drinking bowl, and the bowl itself was bent inward on one side, like someone had taken a pipe to the side with great force. What would she do with it? Stab me? Vicious spike aside, it didn’t look like a weapon, but drinking around the spike seemed impossible.

“You should stop while you’re ahead,” I said, challenging her. I needed to gauge how likely it was that she’d try to hurt me—the second I was worried about that was time to try and press the offensive. I’d most prefer to catch her off guard, but if we were going to fight regardless, I’d like to take the first swing. “Nothing you could do to me with that would do you any good. I won’t be any more likely to help if you threaten to hurt me.”

“I see,” she crowed. “Well, that’s quite fortunate then. I didn’t plan to hurt you with this at all.”

Carefully she lined the divot in the side of the cup against her neck, so that the cup was flush against her skin, and tilted the cup so that the pointed part pointed towards her. Slowly, she drew it upwards, and my stomach churned as the spike punctured her neck. I watched in fascinated horror as blood spilled into the cup almost lazily, slower than it should, but still quite quickly enough to fill it in several seconds.

There was something unnatural about it. Unreal. Inhuman, beyond the ordinary atrociousness of the Beast. I began to put the pieces together. The power to enthrall humans, the affinity for darkness. Incredibly keen hearing, secretive, greedy, paranoid. The wheezing breathing, and irregular patterns of doing so. And of course, the blood. As she removed the spike from her neck, I watched the hole, which should have been gushing blood, so soon as she removed the spike. Instead, it briefly looked like someone had pushed a hole into a block of clay, then began to warp and shift, skin knitting together of its own accord. My conclusion was so shocking, I couldn’t keep it in my head, and the word whispered out of my mouth.

“…Vampire.”

“Back to clever again, are we?” The Beast clucked as she retrieved another vessel from beneath her coat, a small wooden bowl. She poured the blood from the metal container to the new one, letting the spike-cup fall to the ground as she finished pouring.

“This blood,” she said, tilting the bowl around in her hands to inspect the contents, “Will bind you to me, bind you to life. It is the taking of blood that ends life, but the giving of blood that creates un-life. The first half of a new phase of existence.”

No, no, I wouldn’t do it! As she held the bowl out to me, I reached out to smack it away, but the Beast spoke too quickly.

“Don’t spill a drop! Take it, drink it all. Every last bit.” Her feral gaze bore down on me. “Now, now! Do it now.”

From there, my motions were mechanical. I took the bowl in two hands trembling, I brought it to my lips. It tasted like liquid nails, and each time I swallowed it was like fire had been shot into my veins. My emotions, my emotions a storm like nothing before—fear, hatred, disgust, rage, sorrow. The moment the bowl was emptied, I threw it away. I felt sick, wanted the foul stuff gone, but as I keeled over retching, nothing but dry-heaving came of it. The taste was foul, it wouldn’t leave my mouth.

“And now,” said the Beast, with finality. “You shall be mine.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw her hand reach down for me.

I drew my sword with blazing speed, lashing out at it. A piece of something flew past my vision as I liberated some amount of flesh from her hand. I wouldn’t go down easy. I wouldn’t lie down and give in to this!

The Beast hissed and drew back, beginning to speak.

“St—”

“No more!” I shrieked, voice hoarse. I could feel her blood in my stomach, moving and shifting as if it somehow still had life. I let the anger of that violation fuel me, propel me forward. I let adrenaline carry me, and I moved like I had never moved in my life.

She wanted to make me a vampire, make me undead. For that to happen, she’d need to kill me, and if vampires were anything like stories about them claimed, she’d do that by trying to drain me of blood. So, I went straight for her mouth. 

My blade stung across The Beast’s right cheek before crashing into her jawbone. She reeled even as she retreated, faster than should be possible. She took hold of something in her coat, but I didn’t have time to see what it was—I saw her stumbling, reorienting towards the ground. Planting her feet. She was going to charge me with some weapon. She wanted to kill me, but she wanted to do it in a particular way, so the strike wouldn’t be for me, but for my sword.

She was too fast for me to react to, but I had anticipated her plan. She’d use some implement to try to knock or twist my weapon away, so rather than guard against her charge, I swung into it. There was a metallic clatter as I caught her attack in motion, pressing in against an overly complicated dagger with a broad crossguard. I was behind in height, strength, and speed, but the leverage my sword gave over the ridiculous dagger meant the Beast was forced to hold the guard or risk me swinging clean into her. She made some utterance of frustration, but it was completely garbled by the damage of my earlier swing. Even though the flesh about the cut was fast-mending, her jaw hung loose on one side where I had landed solidly against bone. 

I pressed in—her position was bad, stance as well. If her guard slipped in towards me, she might get a cut in at my arms or side, but I’d be able to strike her directly across the face. Since I knew exactly how she’d most prefer to attack me, I liked the sound of that trade-off.

But the Beast’s speed was unreal, inhuman.

She broke the guard by leaping backwards once again, and with the target of my pressure gone, I found myself stumbling forward. Before I had half an instant to rebalance, re-anticipate, she ran in against me, making to disarm with a wickedly fast strike. Even as her attack arced into my right hand, I could tell that I wouldn’t be able to keep my sword, so I began a counterattack. My left fist darted out as quick as I could swing it, amounting to a crisp swing through the air that had just been occupied by the Beast’s broken jaw. No good.

The Beast snarled gutturally, seizing me by the neck and hoisting me into the air. My hands came to my throat as I seized at her thumb, but even throwing all my strength into turning it was in vain—her grip was like iron vice. There was a sickening pop as her mouth realigned itself.

“Incredible. Next time…” She gave a frightening, broken grin. “Next time, mine.”

Her head jutted forward. I hit at it, but suspended from the ground as I was, the blows landed against her with futility. There was a numbing, electric sensation as fangs dug into my neck. I gasped for air, kicking, but the dull thump of my foot against her didn’t even yield a flinch.

My next kick was weaker. My third didn’t even reach her. My vision swam. Why couldn’t I think straight? The pinch at my neck reminded me. Right. Blood.

Emotions coursed through me, replacing the blood I was rapidly running out of. Fear. I was going to die. I was going to die! This was it, the end. What was next? Was there a life after death, or was it just… empty? Spite. I was going to die, but this was not the end. The Beast wanted me back, as something of hers. A possession. Shame. Wasn’t it my fault? Isn’t there something I could have done, heeded Lion’s warning? Heeded Steven’s? Was he disappointed in me?

No. Steven would never think that.

I thought of the people I was leaving behind: my parents, my grandparents, my algebra teacher, Steven. When I thought of it that way… what a short list. Did I really amount to that much? In the end, what would they do without me?

What would I do without them?

I didn’t want to know that reality, and yet here it was, panning out before me. My breathing was different, now, I couldn’t feel my limbs. I kicked one last time, just in case, but I didn’t know if it did anything or not. What had gotten me here?

A prickle in my heart. Was it giving out, or was it something else?

Something else. Anger, righteous anger. It was the Beast that had gotten me here. All of this, her fault. A self-obsessed, arrogant, narcissistic, crazed, downright evil abuser of power! A complete and total monster! What kind of person with even a drop of love in their body could do something like this to a person? The shame, humiliation, fear, culminating in the murder of a random stranger, all for what essentially amounted to curiosity over a big pink cat!

The worst part of my fate wasn’t the horror itself, but that there was a person so selfish and cruel, thoughtlessly destructive, that it would happen to me in the first place. That if she were allowed to continue existing, she would inflict on others again, and again, and again… 

I couldn’t let that happen.

So, with my final rattling breath, I swore that it wouldn’t. Not to anyone else, ever again. With my final breath, I swore that I would destroy the Beast, once and for all.


	2. Rite to Remain Silent

_-a moment in the past-_

 

“Here’s a good spot!” Steven declared. He set our basket down and fell backwards into the sand with a short whoop.

I spread the beach-blanket next to him with a laugh, sitting down beside him. As he crawled onto the blanket, he reached into the basket to retrieve two small green balls.

“Here, check this out, I’ve been practicing! I’m trying to keep it as low as I can.”

He tossed them both into the air, one higher than the other. As they fell, he caught then tossed them both with his right hand, falling into a rhythm. Up, down, up, down.

He was pretty good at it.

“So, why juggling?” I ventured.

“Why not?” Steven shrugged with the arm he wasn’t using to juggle.

“I mean… I don’t know if there’s any good reason not to.” I itched at the back of my head. “I’d just be worried that I’d have better things to be doing with my time.”

“Well, if you don’t want to be doing it, it’s probably not the best use of your time. And even if it was, you can do it later.” Steven fumbled a ball a little, sending it higher in the process. He managed to last a few more throws before fouling up and dropping them both.

“It doesn’t really matter if it’s the best thing you’re doing with your time, as long as it’s a good thing to be doing with it,” he said as he cheerfully retrieved them.

“Sure it does,” I argued. “Working on say, being a better clarinet player is a good use of your time. But if someone is falling off a cliff and you could save them, then it isn’t the best use of your time. It definitely matters that you help them not fall instead of playing clarinet.”

“Playing clarinet while watching someone fall off a cliff doesn’t seem like a very good use of time to me.”

“I—it was just an example!”

“I know!” Steven laughed as I mock-pouted at him, then continued. “What I mean is, it’s a lot easier to know that you aren’t doing anything bad than to know if you’re doing the best thing. And if you worry too much about whether you’re doing the best thing, then it’s something that hurts you and you shouldn’t do it.”

“Okay, but… what about now? There’s nothing really bad we could be doing right now.”

“Sun is shining,” Steven nodded, starting to juggle again. “There’s a nice breeze.”

“But it’s probably still better for me to learn how to dance than to play the clarinet, for example. Like, they’re both good things for me to know. But I’d probably be better at dancing, and the skills I’d learn are more likely to help me better at other things I’m trying to learn, like sword-fighting. So, there’s a better thing I could be doing with my time.”

“Why not learn both?”

“I don’t think I could learn to do both at the same time,” I said. “That sounds really hard.”

“No, silly,” he giggled, raising a finger. “One at a time.”

“Well, I mean, maybe. But whenever I’m spending time learning one thing, I can’t learn the other.”

“Still doesn’t seem too hard. When you want to work on one, you work on it. When you want to work on the other one more, you switch.”

“I guess.” A seagull stole my attention as it flew overhead, casting its shadow over us briefly. I paused a moment to appreciate it, then turned back to the conversation.

“But… there aren’t just two things I want to learn, either. There’s just so much I want to do, and there’s not enough time to… do it all, you know?”

“There’s always more time, though. It’s not like time’s something you just run out of.”

I thought about that for a while, before I figured out why we were approaching the problem so differently.

“Oh. I mean, I guess for you, there isn’t really a point you run out of time.” I rubbed at my wrist. “You’re part-gem, though. I’m… human. Eventually I’m going to get too old to dance, if that makes sense. As time goes on, I’m going to reach a point where I can do fewer and fewer things, and then eventually nothing at all. That’s a problem that I have, that you just… don’t.”

“Mm.” Steven brought his juggle to a stop, catching both the balls. Sprawling out across the blanket, he propped himself up with his chin resting on his wrists.

“I was thinking about that, actually,” he said. “I mean, I probably won’t ever get old and die, right? Because gems don’t really get old. But if I don’t die of old age, I don’t see any reason why you would.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t exactly follow. Just because you won’t get old doesn’t mean that I won’t.”

“Well, it’s not like everyone has some little timer in them, and when it hits zero they die. You don’t die by reaching a certain age.” Steven began to fetch things out of the basket. A container of hard-boiled eggs, a few cloth napkins, a pair of sandwiches, and some soft drinks were lain out across the blanket as he talked.

“Something wears out, and the body can’t fix it any more. Those little things pile up, and then they die. But when I heal someone, I fix everything that their body can’t fix for them. So as long as we’re still friends, I don’t see any reason you won’t live at least as long as me.”

I wrapped my mind around that thought. Did a lifelong friendship with Steven mean, well, a long-life friendship? I mean, healing magic probably wouldn’t make my lifespan any shorter.  That wouldn’t make sense. And there was also the whole deal with what had happened to Lars—I wasn’t even close to sure what all the implications of that could be. Did it keep him from aging?

“We don’t know your healing works like that, though.”

“We don’t know it doesn’t. I’d like to think it does.” He gave a wan smile. “That sounds nice, and I don’t really want to think about outliving everyone except the Gems forever and ever. That sounds really sad.”

“You sap!” I nudged his arm with a grin.

“Ow!” Steven grinned back a bit sheepishly. “A little. I can’t help it! If something happened to you, I’d just… I’d really miss you.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen to me.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “I promise.”

Steven put his hand over mine, holding it close.

“Thanks,” he said. His voice quavered, just a little. He probably didn’t even notice. “It means a lot to me. Things have been scary lately, and sometimes… sometimes I’m scared for you, too.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve got this.”

“We’ve got this,” he repeated, taking a deep breath. I squeezed his shoulder gently as I felt him relax, and let the moment of calm wash over us. Steven needed more calm, in his life. After a few seconds, he found his goofy smile again.

“It doesn’t matter too much, though,” he decided. I looked at him with concern.

“Like, the whole time thing,” he clarified. “Not the other stuff. That’s still important.”

“Oh!” I chuckled a little. “Had me worried for a second.”

“No, that’s okay! I’m… I’m fine! Doing good.” He blushed a little as he laughed it off, his hand leaving mine to rub the back of his head awkwardly. I took that as a queue to give him some space, and let go of his shoulder.

“So, uhh… what’s not important again?”

“Oh, right! Time! You don’t have to worry about that right now, because I know exactly what the best thing you could be doing with your time right now is.”

Steven fished the last item out of our basket. _The Acrostic Arsonist,_ a mystery novel I had picked for us to read together. I’d heard good things about it.

“Having a lovely picnic and reading a great book with your best jam bud in the world!”

I laughed. Like so many other times, he wasn’t even a little bit wrong.

 

_-present-_

 

My first moments of lucidity were of a quickening. A quickening of dead flesh, slumped across the ground, to not-quite-dead flesh. A quickening of mind, and sense. A quickening of time, where the world seemed to accelerate into being from still life. Even before I opened my eyes, the world was a frenetic mess of sensation. Smells inundated me: the copper tang of my own spent blood, the bitter-sour of rubber worn off tires.

The hearing, though, the hearing was beyond compare. I heard the creaking bones of a precocious bat in flight, its _dit-dit-dit_ heartbeat thrumming away as it swooped and dived for insects. A wary squirrel with a pitter-patter heartbeat was investigating the scene from above, climbing about the understructure. Heartbeats, heartbeats, I could hear those better than anything else. Dozens upon dozens, all around me.

Across the street there was a large house, where a man and his son were eating dinner. Heartbeats, _thump-bump_ , _thump-bump_ . Between bites, they argued over the merits of cake frosting. I got the sense that the boy was winning, but that the father was not convinced he was losing. They laughed. _Thump-bump_ . _Thump-bump_. Blood rushing through their veins. It called to me, called to me in such a way that I was disturbed by it. I decided to reject it, searching for something else in the sea of noise about me, something to distract me.

Something else nearby. _Click-a-tic-a-click-a-tic-a-click-a-tic-a_ —some clockwork mechanism. Perhaps, in fact, a clock? I heard the tiny groans of the spring unwinding, the one ‘tick’ louder than all the rest. I sat up to investigate, rising surprisingly easily.

 _Click_. The woman before me hit a switch on the stopwatch with a grin.

“Ninety-three and eight-tenths seconds since you hit the ground. You know, it took me four whole hours to rise after I was given unlife. Truly, you are among the restless dead.”

As the Beast laughed, fluid sloshed about her insides. Dimly, I registered that it was my blood. I felt at the side of my neck. A jagged set of puncture marks marked where teeth had set in, four or five in all. Blood lingered wet and sticky where the Beast had failed to claim it—I traced it down to my shirt, where I saw that at least half of my left side was damp with the stuff.

“Ahh,” I said. I frowned. That wasn’t what I’d meant to say. My word had simply… petered out. At first I suspected some form of trickery on the Beast’s part, but I quickly realized that I simply didn’t have any air in my lungs for me to speak with. I took a slow breath in.

“I’m dead.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“You killed me,” I clarified. “Why am I not more freaked out about that?”

“Is the answer not clear?” The Beast spread her arms with a triumphant grin. “Listen to the world about you, the majesty I’ve revealed. The fullness of words and intents, reality laid bare. Have I not lifted you above the rabble of this world? Are you not grateful?”

I considered what she said. What had changed between now and some two minutes ago, while she was killing me? The viscerality of emotion had gone—the white-hot rage, the pump of adrenaline, the animal fear. Yet all that she had done still disgusted me, from a rational and elevated perspective. The Beast was still a trespasser, still a kidnapper and a murderer. She still had whatever plans she had for me. She would still continue to abuse and manipulate the lives of others. None of that had changed.

“No,” I decided. “I’m pretty sure I still hate you.”

“Hmph. Figures. How boring.”

I reached for my fallen sword, and used it to stand up. I felt light, almost wispy as I did so—like a stiff breeze might pick me up and blow me away. I rubbed a thumb against my crossguard. What was it, exactly, that kept me from attacking her now?

Rather than to sit thinking about it and give her a chance to put her plans in motion, I decided to find out. I burst forward, raising my sword high for a vertical strike.

The Beast raised a hand in a dismissive motion, making for me to halt, and I froze practically in midair. I finished my leap awkwardly, landing right in front of her, blade barely over a hand’s width from her face.

Almost tauntingly, The Beast lowered her hand. Experimentally, I tried to follow through the rest of my swing. I made only the barest bit of progress before stiffening up once more.

**[[Only a nimrod would take that as an invitation to attack.]]**

I blinked. That thought wasn’t mine.

“There’s a voice in my head,” I accused the Beast. “What did you do?”

“A voice in your head, huh?” The Beast leaned in around my sword leeringly. “Sounds like what happens when I think: I hear a voice in my head. Ever done any thinking before?”

“I’m not stupid,” I said, glaring back at her.

“Oh, I suppose you wouldn’t fall for that.” The Beast gave a long-suffering sigh as she stepped back, stretching. “You can’t fault me for trying, it would have been hilarious.”

“Tell me!”

“Sword-brandishers don’t get answers,” she clucked.

I grimaced. Combat seemed out of the question. If she could stop me from attacking so easily, stopping me from fleeing couldn’t be too much harder. At this rate a weapon wouldn’t do me half as much good as extra information, so I resheathed my sword with a huff and crossed my arms as I stared her down.

**[[That wasn’t so hard, was it?]]**

Well… no, it wasn’t hard. But I wouldn’t have thought that. That thought, that one wasn’t mine either. It was disruptive, out of place, like someone with no context had simply dropped it in without knowing what it would do.

“Listen to me, child. You’ll find gratitude soon enough. This is a new phase in your existence! I’ve done more for you than I’ve done for me.”

“Must have missed the update to the handbook,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Didn’t know that killing people to control their corpses was a charitable act.”

“You have more control now than ever, whelp,” the Beast snapped. “In my blood, I have given you riches beyond compare in the mortal realm! Against it, all the swords and pens of man wilt limply.”

Almost lazily, the Beast bounced up on one foot, and just… stayed there. She floated the merest distance above the ground, not as if it were a feat, but as if she were above carrying her own weight.

“You can’t tell me you’ve never wanted to fly,” she taunted with a cackle, swooping in towards me. “This and more, I have given you. The power to—”

“Floating’s not worth dying for.” My rebuke sent her drifting backwards, almost poutingly.

“Well, you’ve already gone and died,” the Beast groused. “At least find something worth being dead for.”

“That’s not…” I put a hand to my forehead. “That’s not how that works. You don’t find something worth dying for after you’re dead.”

“You should show more respect if you want to learn anything,” the Beast said, eyes narrowing.

“If you want my—” Quite suddenly, I was cut off mid-sentence. Acting of its own accord, my entire expression changed. Suddenly, I found my glare pointed down, my expressions less severe. Emotionally, mentally, nothing had changed at all, but I still found myself in a comparatively demure position.

**[[That wasn’t what respect looks like. And I do want answers, don’t I?]]**

The Beast laughed.

“Good, good! Much better. You were saying?”

“I was about to say,” I said, cautiously. “That if you wanted to expect my respect, you’d have to earn it.”

“I feel with all I’ve done for you, I’ve quite already earned it. Your service to me—and let us be clear that you _do_ serve me—is not something I have taken from you, understand? Rather, it is payment due for service rendered. A little respect could go a long way to paying that debt.” She chuckled, and continued almost as an afterthought. “The, ah, thoughts unbidden? You could call that a receipt. Or perhaps, perhaps a debt-collector.”

“It’s a neat trick, but I’ll humbly admit that I can only do so much,” the Beast preened, antithetical to all humility. “I wasn’t able to give it any of my memories while keeping its core functionality intact, but it’s probably smart enough with just your memories to work off.”

I felt sick. Not in a biological way—I didn’t even know if that was possible, anymore—but in a conceptual way. Not being alone in your own head was creepy enough figuratively, I didn’t need for it to be literal.

“Serve me, and you’ll get along just fine. Reject my orders, however, and it will… collect on your debt.” She grinned maliciously. “Each time it takes control, it becomes more suited to the task, quicker to do so in the future.”

“I—you—” I stammered. I wasn’t even sure how to react. My mind had been invaded by a… thing, a thing that had stolen all my memories and could taunt me from inside my head. My own personal evil clone, but one I couldn’t run away from. So where were the emotions, uncontrollable and fierce? The scale of rage that felt appropriate to this situation simply wasn’t coming. It was gone, gone with all my endorphins and adrenaline.

Spite, however, I found plenty of.

“I don’t owe you anything,” I spat. “And this… thing, it’s not a debt-collector. It’s a Parasite.”

“Oh?” The Beast chortled. “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

“Of course—”

The Beast interrupted me, snapping her fingers twice in front of my face.

“News flash, whelp. _We’re_ parasites. We don’t have anything to give to the humans, and we’ve got no reason to try.” She flipped her hair back as she reoriented in the air, settling in what looked more like a sitting position. “We can profit off their idiocy, succeed off their weakness, siphon off their victory. For every human living the high life, there can be a vampire living a higher life in the very same building. Taking all they want, for nothing in return. That life is yours, now.”

“You’re a parasite by choice, not by nature,” I retorted sourly. “You’re the only thing that’s stopping you from helping people.”

**[[You’re no different from Mother. Aren’t you a little parasite, yourself?]]**

“Shut up,” I muttered.

**[[You’ve shaped your life around Steven.  Your schedule practically runs to his heartbeat. Every morning, there’s stretches, then exercises, and only after those do you have breakfast. Steven first, then you. When you don’t go down to Beach City the first thing in the morning, you can’t stop thinking about him. There’s a thrill every time your phone so much as blinks on. Is it him? No, just the battery running low.]]**

“Shut up, shut up!”

The Beast started laughing as my volume built to a shout.

“That’s not… I care about him! That’s not being a parasite!” The Parasite wasn’t me, I reminded myself. I didn’t think those things.

**[[Oh? I suppose it wouldn’t be. Not in a literal sense. Why, you’d give anything for him, give everything. You have. But don’t pretend for a moment that it was out of selflessness. You did it because you had no other option, because it’s your very nature. What you are, is an emotional parasite. Isn’t that right?]]**

I grit my teeth. The Beast was howling with laughter.

“You look completely insane,” she choked out between a fit of wheezing.

“Back off,” I growled, not sure if I was speaking more to the Beast or the Parasite. “You don’t have half a clue what you’re talking about.”

**[[Steven lets you be something, but without him, you’re just a background character. You experience your entire life vicariously through him, and if he gets taken away, everything goes back to exactly how it was before you met him. No life, no friends, no dreams, no hope. No story. And you know as well as I do that you don’t have what it takes to be the main character.]]**

I opened my mouth to say something more—some counter-argument, a rebuttal—but thought better of it. I’d never be able to get the last word in against a bully who could talk without spending air, and I didn’t expect to win over the Parasite in a battle of reason. Its sole purpose was to keep me in line, and if had all my memories, it knew all my insecurities. Saying anything else would merely fan the flames. I settled on waiting for the Beast to stop laughing.

I tried taking a couple of deep breaths to calm myself, but it felt robotic and pointless. I wasn’t actually getting anything out of the oxygen. It wasn’t at all like anything like breathing sounded like, either. Real breathing was periodic, but inconsistent. An event more than a rhythm. Even the old lady across the river, using a breathing machine, her breath was better, different to mine. Over the churning hum of her machine, in and out. Over the mechanical hum, her weak heartbeat, _bup-bup_ , _bup-bup_.

No, no. Focus. I shut out the sound again.

“Oh, oh, lovely,” the Beast finally managed to speak after recovering from her fit. “We’ll get along swimmingly, won’t we now? Connie, yes?”

“If you’re going to kill someone, you should at least know their name,” I grumbled.

“Oh? Did I get it wrong?”

“No,” I sighed. “No, you got it right.”

“I don’t see the problem, then.”

“That’s not the—” I groaned. “Ugh. Nevermind.”

**[[Useless. Like a spectator in my own body.]]**

_I_ felt like a spectator! What right did the Parasite have to complain? I tried to focus on something distant to put it out of my mind, but doing so only brought my attention back to the continuous throb of heartbeats around us. Each time I realized it was there, each pump and rush of blood became more and more sickly fascinating. Harder to set aside. Curiosity was beginning to set in—I didn’t have to kill someone, to taste their blood. I didn’t need to be like the Beast.

What would it taste like?

I rejected the notion, refocusing my hearing on the small area under the bridge, again. I didn’t need to invade people’s privacy by listening to them in their own homes to taste their blood, either. I could get blood by donation. Ethically sourced blood.

Wait, no! I cursed internally. By accepting that I should drink ethically-sourced blood, I implicitly had already accepted that _I should drink blood._ That wasn’t right. That wasn’t normal.

The Beast stared down at me, with an evaluative grin.

“Ah. Starting to feel your first hunger pains, are you? Don’t worry—we’ll get you something before I send you to fetch the boy for me. Can’t have you damaging the merchandise.”

It couldn’t be that easy, could it? So easy for me to slip away, dying unheard under a bridge in the night. So easy to slip away, my self and agency rotted away. So easy for me to disappear, to become a monster which only happened to inhabit the shell once named Connie.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said. It sounded so canned, so dry. I was tired. Tired of all of this.

“Mm, is that so?” The Beast cackled. “And who, do you think, will stop me?”

Who would? Who could?

**[[There’s nothing he can do. I’m already dead. This is hopeless. Past recovery.]]**

Anger, light, fire flared in my heart, even as it rested still and unbeating in my chest. Almost out of spite, I refused the Parasite’s notion. Steven would stop her, Steven could stop her. Steven would come, and he’d bring the Crystal Gems. I had to believe in that!

**[[If he had gotten the text, he would have been here by now. He has no clue.]]**

He was afraid for me, when he left. He knew something was wrong, he’d trust his gut, he was on his way! It wasn’t just that I had to believe in him, but that I did. Unconditionally, immediately, I knew he would find me. I simply knew it, a form of faith. A seed of hope.

“Well, come along, then. We’ll find you someone you like, hm?” The Beast hovered to the left for a few seconds before almost begrudgingly setting down on the ground, beginning to walk off.

The further I got from my house, the further I’d be from where Steven expected and the worse my chances were. I needed to stall the Beast, to keep her where she was right now. In order to do anything, I’d have to dance around the Parasite, and so I’d need it to believe I was being subservient in order for it to let me do the things I chose.

The Parasite didn’t understand hope beyond where it could exploit it, beyond where it could extinguish it. So if I were to do something which would immensely help the Beast, right now, the Parasite would let me. And it would take up time, keep her where she was for however many critical moments it took for Steven to get here.

“Steven will,” I answered belatedly. “Steven will stop you.”

“Oh?” The Beast turned back, intrigued. “Is that so?”

“He’s…” I couldn’t keep her attention without giving her information. I couldn’t _help_ her without giving her information, and I needed to help her in order to keep my free will. I needed to go all-in.

“He’s really strong,” I warned her. “Probably strong enough to lift a car. Maybe two. He can also summon a magic shield, and floats.”

The Beast stared blankly for a moment. Slowly, surely, a hungry smile worked its way across her face.

“You’re certain?”

“Absolutely.”

“Forget the lion.” Her smile only got more twisted. “I want the boy.”

“Forget them both,” I told her. “His family would hunt you for the rest of your existence, if you hurt him.”

“Ha!” The Beast snorted. “I’ll outlive them.”

“They’ve got a head-start on you.” I smiled grimly. “They’re thousands of years old.”

The Beast stared blankly at me again. Shock, incredulity. She was a egoist who thought she’d seen it all, so I’d blow her out of the water. Shock would waste time, and Steven would get here. He had to.

“Impossible,” she snarled. “Nothing could live that long, and the boy doesn’t bear the smell of unlife.”

“His family isn’t human, for the most part. The Crystal Gems. They’re magical warriors from another galaxy. You don’t stand a chance against them—your best bet is to run. And if you hurt Steven, you’ll be running for the rest of eternity. In fact,” I chuckled hollowly, and crossed my arms with a shake of my head. “You’re probably already in a lot of trouble with them for hurting me. You’ve got a lot of running ahead of you.”

“In—nrgh.” The Beast growled, and began pacing. Step, step, step, step. Wasted time.

**[[I was going to have to warn her at some point anyway. Good to do it now.]]**

I almost wanted to laugh. I realized now, what the Parasite was trying to do—trying to imitate my thoughts, fool me into thinking that its projected thoughts were my own. So here it was, trying to encourage me. It thought that it was winning. Instead, it was gambling. My win, when Steven showed. I just needed to keep my faith up.

The Beast stopped pacing, and stared at me. Eyes wide, with fear? No, that didn’t fit. Her eyebrow twitched, her mouth a sneer.

“How many? How many of these… aliens?”

“Three,” I said, then corrected myself. “No, four. One’s new, though, and not really a threat. You probably won’t have to fight her.”

“Three?” The Beast curled her lip with disdain. “And you dare insinuate that they could defeat me? I am above any three.”

“You’re at best on par with any of one them,” I said, shaking my head. I couldn’t help a smile. “Speed is the only thing you have against them. Running is your best option.”

“I doubt that they’re even anything more than human. More than anything, I am disappointed that the first I graced with the gift of unlife was so piteous a fool. Aliens. Feh. The boy’s strength, too, then. Maybe even the lion. Frauds. I can’t believe I was so nearly taken in.”

She turned sourly, beginning to walk off again.

**[[Denial is not an option. She is in danger if she underestimates them.]]**

“You’re really going to say that aliens are outlandish? You’re a vampire! Where’s your self-awareness?”

No response.

“One of them—Pearl—she’s my mentor,” I called to the Beast, not moving. “A year and a half of her training was all it took for a human girl, barely a teenager, to hurt you in combat.”

The Beast whirled.

“That you hit me at all was a fluke.” she declared, eyes lit with rage. “Don’t flatter yourself by calling it ‘damage.’ It was an inconvenience, no more.”

“You haven’t forgotten your hand, have you? If it was one fluke, then it was at least two. In all the time I’ve trained with Pearl, I still haven’t landed a hit on her once in solo combat. Not even a fluke.”

The Beast seemed no less angry, but she didn’t interrupt me.

**[[No more taunting. We have her attention, now we must utilize it.]]**

“If you’re going to fight them, Pearl’s probably still the one you’re most likely to beat. She’s incredibly skilled, but she’s probably the most vulnerable of the three, the least innately suited to combat. If you catch her off-guard enough with your speed, you could overwhelm her before she has a winning strategy. She’ll beat you if she gets to engage on her terms, though.”

It took a second for the Beast to process what I was saying. What I was giving her. Strategy.

“Tell me more,” she commanded. “The others.”

I hesitated a moment. Was it worth telling her this, strategy on how to beat them? It was out of the cards to turn back now, but had I made the right decision starting this path in the first place? No, I decided. This was best.

The Beast didn’t strike me as the sort to really take a lesson to heart until failing to follow it had properly hurt her. Perhaps more pertinently, the Parasite would compel me to warn the Beast about the Crystal Gems at some point anyway—by choosing to do it now, I gave myself a chance, just a chance, at escape. And since I couldn’t choose to drag it out anymore, I’d want to try to tell the Beast when she was most off-guard, least likely to accept my warnings and most likely to make me repeat myself later. It wasted the most of her time, this way.

“Amethyst is like Pearl’s opposite in a lot of ways,” I started. “She isn’t good at battle-tactics, gets distracted easily, and can be a sloppy fighter. But she’s quick, powerful, and unpredictable. Clever where you don’t expect it. You can probably take a hit from her, but that’s not what you should be afraid of—she fights with a whip, and if it snares you, you’ll completely lose control of the fight. You’ll want to fight defensive against her, and use your speed to counterattack when she does something risky.”

“And the third?”

“The third is Garnet, you won’t miss her. Built like a brick wall. She’s significantly less dangerous at range than she is up close, but you should probably just avoid her entirely. She can see the future. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that you probably just shouldn’t bother. She’s on a completely different level from the other two.”

The Beast stewed on that for a few seconds.

“I’ll be the judge of that. You may be underestimating me.”

I laughed hollowly.

“You don’t have to be. Trust me, if you have any trouble at all against Pearl or Amethyst, you can’t beat Garnet.”

“Well, then,” The Beast harrumphed. “That’s a bridge to cross when we get to it. I suppose we’ll have to take them in their sleep, or—”

“They don’t sleep.”

The Beast gave me a cross look for my interruption. I was very far from sorry.

“In any case,” The Beast carried on. “We’ll figure out what to do about all these… aliens later. Getting you fed is now even more of a priority, if we’re to be sure we can fight them.”

We were leaving, then. Still no Steven. I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. Part of me knew that it was a long-shot, but somehow, I thought that it was certain. That just by believing it was true, that alone would save me. Of course it wouldn’t. The best hope could do was buy me time, and I was out of it. I began to trudge after the Beast.

It seemed, though, that time was all I had needed.

 

A roar rang out two blocks down, and two new heartbeats joined the swirling maelstrom of noise, two different from all the rest. One gave a solemn _bum-pah_ once every few seconds, a veritable wardrum. The other, powerful and furious, fast but not frantic. _Fah-dum_ , _fah-dum_ , full of fear and fire.

“Connie!”

Steven.

 

How had he known where to warp to? A grin split across my face—that wasn’t a gift horse to be looking in the mouth right now.

“They’re here,” I warned the Beast smugly. “Told you.”

“Get back in there,” she muttered with a sneer, pointing at the hollow I had died in. “We’ll hide until—”

Lion had hardly taken a second stride before another voice called out.

“Here!” Garnet.

There was a whistle of air as she leapt down to our height, landing perhaps thirty meters upstream. She landed only briefly in a crouch before her legs unfolded explosively, launching towards us, jaw set and fist cocked. Even with a cold start, the Beast stumbled out of reach in the nick of time, but Garnet seemed nonplussed. In an instant, her fist spread into an open hand and her legs dropped into a slide. Like it had been planned from the start, she dipped her fingers into the ground, violently upsetting the earth as she arrested her movement.

Garnet formed her gauntlets, illuminating her hands through the dust with purple-white light as she stood to interpose herself between the Beast and me. Upstream, I heard Pearl and Amethyst jump down as well. Lion followed closely, but was falling behind. Their approach was uncanny—even for her lack of a heartbeat, the Beast had skin which stretched, bones that creaked, fluid that shifted. The gems, on the other hand, were all holes in the world of noise around me. The only noises they made were intentional, or else the noises of things they touched.

“End of the line,” Garnet said. “Give up now, and we won’t have to hurt you.”

“Drown yourself in the river,” the Beast intoned with hostility, meeting Garnet’s gaze.

Garnet shrugged and lunged forward. The Beast snarled, drawing two long daggers with lightning speed.

The Beast came in fast with her knives, swinging in from both horizontals at once, like a mantis trying to snare its prey. Garnet was not a bug to be so easily crushed or killed: with a sweep of her left gauntlet, she knocked one of the blades away and splintered the other. The Beast reeled to avoid a counterattack, but had overcommitted. Garnet reversed her rotation, and a crack split the air as her left hook connected.

The Beast bounced off the ground once before righting herself in midair, twirling about like a marionnette whose strings had been untangled. She leapt straight up to avoid a rolling attack from Amethyst, and drew a new blade to meet Pearl’s closely-following attack.

The Beast ran straight into Pearl’s spear charge, her speed carrying her around the tip of the spear and letting her swing straight in. She led with a high vertical strike, which Pearl avoided by turning on her lead foot, her forward momentum suddenly shifting to rotation. The Beast had to duck Pearl’s spear as it whipped back around, and having so dodged, made to thrust into Pearl’s center—

But she had forgotten Amethyst, who had exited her spinning form nearly as soon as she missed.

“Hup!” She lashed her whip out at the Beast, snaring her ankle and heaving her back under the bridge. The Beast sailed up and over Amethyst, but instead of slamming into the ground, the Beast threw her broken dagger with great force. The blade cut through the whip, and might have cut through Amethyst had she not jumped aside with a short yelp.

The Beast tightened her fall and landed in a crouch, bringing out yet another blade to replace the broken one.

Pearl closed the distance, joining Amethyst at the right side of the bridge, while Garnet stepped back to close off the Beast’s escape path.

On the left, Garnet stood tall and chiseled, like an implacable golem blocking the path. Pearl and Amethyst effectively sealed off exit from the right, looking the part of the lofty warrior-elf allied with the irascible river-spirit. The Beast, lean and twisted like a caught demon, glanced between her rivals. Her eyes turned towards escape across the river, but with a roar, a portal opened on the opposite bank. Great glowing eyes of pink haloed by a flowing broad mane of near-white, the nature-god presiding and judging over all. Illuminated solely by the pale pink light of his mount, Steven’s face was ghostly over Lion’s mane, seeming to float above it. His eyes were intense, focused.

 _Fah-dum_. _Fah-dum_. His heartbeat, centering it all.

“Let’s try this again,” Garnet said. “You’re surrounded. Put down your weapons, and you won’t have to get hurt.”

“Well, not too much, anyway.” Amethyst said, grinning.

“Not helping, Amethyst.” Pearl gave her a sideline glare.

“Well it’s not like Garnet can just un-punch her!”

Pearl groaned.

“Girl,” the Beast whispered under her breath. There was no way that any of the others could hear it, but this close, it was practically the only thing I could hear. _Fah-dum_. _Fah-dum_. Nearly the only thing.

“Take the orb when they’re distracted. Keep it safe, and hidden. Destroy it if they find it.”

The orb? What orb?

Suddenly, the Beast exploded into motion, flinging both of her blades at Garnet with uncanny accuracy and speed. Garnet deflected both with her gauntlets, sending them tumbling into the dirt, but the Beast was already reaching for daggers better-suited to throwing. The third went to Garnet again, stalling her advance, but a fourth flew at me. I ducked it without too much trouble—it would have been a graze along my cheek at worst in any case.

Why would she throw it at me? A feint, an attempt to distract the others, or perhaps an attempt to make me seem less connected to her. Perhaps it was meant to send this ‘orb’ to me?

Whatever the case, it spurred Pearl into action. She grit her teeth and lowered her spear, firing a burst of energy in response, but it fell short—the Beast had already began to move towards the river. As her feet hit the water, the Beast whirled in motion, throwing three daggers with practiced rapidity. Pearl winced as the steel hurtled towards her, but Amethyst used her whip as a defensive screen, battering the blades out of the air.

**[[They’re distracted. Now, find it now.]]**

I glanced behind me cautiously, checking for the dagger. Sunk into the edge of the hollow, a oddly large red gem adorned its pommel. That had to be it: quickly, I seized it and wrenched the orb free. On closer inspection, it wasn’t a gem at all, but rather a glass marble nearly half filled with blood. I hid it away in a pocket.

A roar brought my attention back to the fight. Lion had pressed forward atop the water, attacking with shockwaves to force the Beast back to the riverbank. The Beast took a different tack, leaping up to the cross-beams of the bridge. Pearl whipped her spear up to fire two shots at her, but it was a feint—with incredible speed, the Beast jumped back towards the ground and ricocheted off to the left. If I had blinked I would have missed it, and at such extreme velocity, she ought to have been home free.

Garnet, however, was moving before the Beast had touched the ground. Her strike lanced out exactly as the Beast passed, and there was a crack as the Beast went flying through one of the bridge’s support pillars. A plume of water marked where the Beast went sprawling into the river. Before Lion or anyone else could reach her, she launched herself out of the water, rocketing off into the distance like she was suspended on wires.

She was gone.

For a brief second, the only sounds were the creaking groan of the bridge slowly sagging on one side, wanting for its missing support, and the heartbeats out on the river. _Fah-dum_ , _fah-dum_.

“Gah! She got away!” Amethyst kicked at some dirt. “What kind of gem moves that fast?”

“I… don’t know,” Pearl admitted. “She didn’t look like any gem I know of. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say—”

Garnet inspected the knuckles of her gauntlet, one at a time, then dismissed them.

“She wasn’t a gem,” Garnet decided with a frown. “Gems don’t have blood.”

“Hey big guy, we need to go check on Connie,” Steven whispered to Lion.

Lion stared me down.

“Hey, Connie!” Steven called, giving up on convincing his ride to move forward. “Connie, are you alright?”

I laughed nervously. I wasn’t sure what to feel. I was certainly glad to be out of the Beast’s hands, but the Parasite meant that I was still effectively under her thumb. I was a liability to them, bound to betray them whenever it might hurt them most.

“I’m… I’ll be fine,” I said. I just didn’t want him to worry. “How did you guys find me?”

“We came as soon as we got the text,” Amethyst said. “But we didn’t know where to look. You only said ‘ash,’ so we checked way upriver, where the fire was a few years ago. Seemed like the kind of place a kidnapper would hide, you know?”

“But while we were calling your name, a pair of ladies on a run told us they saw someone that looked like you around here,” Pearl said, nodding. “Luckily, it looks like you didn’t end up too far from where they saw you.”

Rats—if I’d only gotten one letter more off on that text, the b of Ashbrook, they might have tried to check the river slightly closer to my house. Then again, I was lucky enough already they had gotten the text at all.

“Well… thanks. Thanks for coming for me.”

“Connie, are you alright? You don’t sound too good.” Pearl dismissed her spear as her hand went to her forehead. “Well, obviously, I suppose. You were just… yes, that must have been quite harrowing.”

“You didn’t get hit by that knife, right?” Amethyst asked.

I felt at my left cheek, where it had flown past. Not even a scratch—but I quickly realized it wouldn’t look that way. My left side was still soaked in blood from the Beast’s meal. In fact, how had they not noticed already? Wouldn’t it have been obvious? It took me a moment to realize that it was dark out—my eyes could see in the low light perfectly, but to the rest I was probably just a silhouette.

“ **I think it nicked me,** ” I said. Or rather, the Parasite said, using my mouth.

**[[They’ll be suspicious if you don’t give a reason for the blood.]]**

I felt a spurt of anger, then canned it. I needed to think faster in order to prevent the Parasite from having excuses to seize control.

“Oh! Here, one moment. Let me take a look.” Pearl stepped towards me, Amethyst tailing shortly behind. Garnet dismissed her gauntlets, and stood straighter. Stiffer.

“No, wait—” I held up my hand, but Pearl had already lit up her gem, casting the light out like a small headlamp.

Pale white light cast dramatic shadowing over the wrinkles in my clothing. I winged a bit as the amount of blood I had lost became more clear—my shirt was a tanish off-white on one side, and a mottle of blackish-red on the other. Pearl’s hand went to her mouth. Amethyst winced a little, a hiss of air coming through her teeth.

“Hey, uh, Steven,” Amethyst called out. “We might need some of your healing mojo real soon, here.”

“On it!” _Fah-dum_ , _fah-dum_ , the beat of his heart grew faster. Steven tried to egg Lion forward one more time before giving up, stumbling over his mane to jump into the water. It was shallow enough that even from the center, he was able to start wading towards the riverbank. Lion followed close behind him.

“Oh Connie, oh Connie,” Pearl muttered, crouching to better reach me.

“Show me where, where’d you get hit?” She lifted my arm delicately with one hand, and went to probe at my side with the other. Searching for a wound, a cut in my shirt. She wouldn’t find one.

I pulled away.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

 _Fah-dum_ , Steven grew closer. His heart, his heart, I could hardly hear anything else!

“What? No, there’s blood everywhere!” Amethyst squinted at me. “Stop playing tough guy on us, and let Steven spit on you.”

“One moment! I’m nearly there!” Steven could see me better from his new angle. I saw his eyes go wide in horror, a stutter in his step, then his pace redoubled.

 _Fah-dum-fah-dum_. His heart raced.

Only a taste… If I could get only a taste, I’d be happy.

“S-Steven. Stay away,” I managed. “Stay away!”

“It’s okay, Connie! I’m here!” The splash of water as he stepped onto the bank might have been the crash of the ocean. _Fah-dum_.

“No,” I tried to warn him.

“It’s going to be alright!” Was he telling me that, or himself?

I backed into the hollow.

“Stop,” I shouted. “Stop, stay back!”

Steven stopped only for a second. He tried his best to smile as he took another step.

“Whatever you’re worried about, it… it’ll be fine.”

**[[If you attack the boy, our cover is blown. Control your thirst!]]**

I tensed as I found I had no more room to back further into the hollow. Why was I even doing this? I should give in, go forward. A taste. Steven would be fine. The gems would be warned that I was a danger, and I’d be caught, caged by the gems. Safe, safer for me, safer for everyone.

Because it was wrong. If I attacked, I’d be like the Beast, taking by right of force alone.

Because I’d hurt Steven. Maybe not physically, maybe not permanently, but emotionally and mentally. Steven didn’t need that right now. He didn’t need to see his friend attack him. He deserved better.

Because I didn’t want his memories of me, of the person who cared for him so deeply, to have a capstone of trauma. If the Parasite grew more powerful, took more and more of me, memories like his might become the only thing left of me.

The counterargument came with Steven’s next step.

 _Fah-dum_. Blood rush, blood gush. _Fah-dum_. It called me.

I found distraction in Garnet’s movement as she reached down to grab Steven’s shoulder.

“I think you should listen to her,” Garnet said.

“What?” Steven made no attempt to hide his concern anymore. “But she’s hurt.”

“She’s trying to warn us. We should listen.” Garnet glanced my way. “I’m seeing more and more futures where she tries to hurt you, Steven.”

Steven’s mouth opened in shock, puzzlement. He looked to try to speak for a second or so, starting and stopping. He looked at me forlornly, as he finally managed something.

“Why?”

I bowed my head in shame. I couldn’t tell him.

Amethyst ground her teeth, a scowl spreading across her face.

“It was that lady, wasn’t it! She did something to her.”

“That’s quite possible.” Pearl stepped back, glancing between me and Steven. “She did warn us that there was a ‘mind control lady.’ Maybe she… oh, Connie. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“But, she’s hurt,” Steven said. “Shouldn’t we—shouldn’t I do something?”

Garnet smiled reassuringly.

“I don’t see anything bad happening to Connie any time soon,” she soothed. “We’ll take care of her. It’s late—you should go home and get some rest, so you can help in the morning.”

Steven shook his head.

“No, I want to help now. I won’t be able to sleep, anyway.”

 _Fah-dum_. I needed to do something, now, while I could still distract myself from the hunger.

“Steven, go. Please. I’ll be fine,” I said. “Just please, go. I don’t want to hurt you.”

He looked back to me. Steel set in his eyes as, slowly, he nodded.

“I’m not abandoning you. I’m going to—we’re going to help you. I promise.”

I smiled as best as I could. It was shallow, weak. It felt a little empty, even. But he needed to see it. Or maybe, I needed him to see it.

“Thanks,” I said.

Solemnly, he walked back to Lion, and clambered onto his back.

“Take care of her,” he said quietly to Garnet. To Amethyst, to Pearl.

“Will do, little bud,” Amethyst said. Pearl nodded in agreement.

Lion gave me a sidelong glance before jumping through a portal with a roar, and the world finally returned to equilibrium. The maddening background-wall of heartbeats hadn’t left, but it was further, easier to dismiss. I slumped to my knees as the tension of the situation left me.

This all, this was so much. The emotions all through me, they were conflicted, unsettled. Joy that I was rescued, fear for my future, anger that I had gotten here. More than anything, though, despair. This was all so… unfair. I hadn’t done anything to deserve a fate so brutal, had I? I clutched my arms together about my waist, as if it would help the cold feeling in my stomach, but my limbs were cold. Cold, dead. The only heat in the core of my body was… leftover. Soon to be no more.

I gave the huff of breath of someone expecting tears, but nothing came. The dead may know sorrow, but they could not cry.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry! This wasn’t fair at all!

Pearl reached her hand down into the hollow. Cautiously, I grabbed it, and she helped me back into the open. There were new expressions on the faces around me—concern, like before, but also wariness. Even from their position of limited knowledge, they knew I was to some degree among the number of the enemy.

**[[They might imprison you. That would not serve Mother.]]**

“I’m worried about my parents,” I said. It was token effort to escape, so that the Parasite couldn’t make it for me. I was fairly confident that I’d be fooling no one, though. “Can I go check on them?”

Garnet and Pearl shared a glance.

“We’ll check on them for you,” Pearl said. “But until then, it’s probably best you come with us.”

Garnet beckoned for me to come closer, and I did. Gently, she lifted me up, carrying me in her arms. She felt oddly warmer than usual, though it was most likely a matter of relativity. I was colder than usual.

“We’ll take her to the nearest warp pad,” Garnet said. “Then we’ll have Steven stay with Greg, and we’ll keep her at the Temple.”

The other gems nodded, and as we began to move, I had time to ruminate.

Cooperating with the Parasite was a losing strategy. It would take its toll on my psyche, and ultimately achieve nothing towards my goals. Rebelling outright was also a failure condition, as it did nothing other than strengthen it. I needed to outsmart it to make any headway at all.

So in the face of all good reason—which, quite inconveniently, was telling me I was doomed—I began to piece together a plan.


	3. Interlude — Phantom Memories

_ -a moment in the past- _

Beach City wasn’t so much a city as it was a hamlet, a spec on the map. Under the watch of the Temple, Steven’s house was isolated even from there, leaving it quiet at night in a way that my house simply would never be. Not silent, though—the continual rhythm of waves against sand in the background reminded you of the world beyond, and late at night it lent enticing weight to the beckoning call of sleep.

Steven was much more susceptible to the lure of sleep than I was. We had been sitting on his couch, working on a jigsaw puzzle. At a certain point he had leaned back his head to rest his eyes and took the rest of his body along for the rest.

His snoring was subtle, short, occasional. If snoring could be polite, then Steven’s snores were the most polite. I did my best to keep working on the puzzle, but I ran into a pair of problems. The first was that there was a bush in the top-left that I couldn’t find the last piece for, and I was fairly confident it had fallen on the floor. The second, more immediately pertinent issue, was that Steven lost his balance, slumping against me in his sleep. The pressure against my side was just enough that I couldn’t lean forward enough to move any pieces without nudging him out of the way, and nudging him out of the way would cause new problems. Most importantly, it might wake him, and I knew he had enough trouble getting sleep as it was. 

But also, it was starting to get cold, and Steven was warm.

I wanted to be warm, to be there for him when he was cold. Like he was, for me. So I settled into my situation, and let my mind drift. A memory returned to my thoughts, and with it both comfort and concern. A sway under my feet, waves shifting beneath me. My dad’s laughter, a guitar singing across the water as I pulled the oars. Comfort. 

Dad didn’t play the guitar. Concern. The memory that could not be reminded me of those others memories like it, that didn’t fit. The color orange, air like fire around me…

The temple doors opened with the slight grind of stone on stone. I stretched to see who it was, but I didn’t quite have an angle on the door.

“Help me, Garnet,” I whispered dramatically as she stepped into view, welcoming the distraction. “Help! I’m trapped!”

“You two look fine to me,” Garnet observed with a smile. “Only thing I think I can help you with is a blanket.”

“No!” I objected, barely suppressing a giggle. “He’s heavy enough as it is! You’ll crush me, I’d die!”

Almost in response, Steven turned in his sleep with a snore, shifting more weight against my shoulder.

“Oof,” I grunted. “I suppose I deserved that.”

“Hm. Steven’s pillow might get jealous,” Garnet said mischievously. “You should watch out for that.”

“I don’t expect to stay the whole night. The pillow can get its turn,” I said, checking the clock. Five past nine. “Dad’s working security for a dance in Beach City tonight—probably Sour Cream’s. I guess the town’s still a bit skittish after the whole thing with the abductions.”

Garnet grimaced.

“That was a mess,” she said, voice tinged with a certain amount of regret.

“Yeah,” I sighed, nodding. I glanced to Steven. “Yeah, it was.”

My arm was starting to feel numb from his weight against it, pins and needles beginning a tiny assault against my left hand. Carefully, I shifted to the right a little. Steven drooped accordingly, slumping against me with a snore. I gently used the new space to free my hand, and gently pat his hair with it. Even his hair was warm.

“So uh…” I did my awkward best to try for small talk. “What are you up to?”

“Thinking,” Garnet said. “Just thinking. I’ve been catching up.”

“What about?”

“Ideas. Events.” Garnet spread her arms wide, indicating not just the scope of the home, but the whole of the world beyond. “I’ve been working on getting my understanding of the future more in sync with my understanding of the present. Steven’s been changing a lot of things recently.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, with a smile. “Yeah, I guess he does that, huh?”

“If there’s something Steven shares with his mother…” Garnet squatted in front of the couch. Her mirrored visor made her hard to read as she looked down to Steven, but there was a slight sharpness to her tone. “‘Complicated’ has no meaning compared to what they do to things.”

I glanced down at the boy curled by my side. In a world without Steven, it’s true that I wouldn’t have to worry about alien abduction, or fighting ancient monsters from another time. But in a world without Steven… 

“Steven may have made my life complicated, but not in a bad way,” I said. “He makes me feel interesting. The whole saving the world thing, that’s a bit scary, but I kind of always wanted to do that.”

Garnet chuckled pleasantly, reaching out to tousle my hair. Like all the gems, her hand felt odd. Warmer than the air around it, and smooth to the touch, but not warm or smooth like a human hand. She was warm the way a lampshade was warm, smooth the way that glass was smooth. Like a mug that someone had given up on microwaving halfway through.

“I think that makes you a great addition to the Crystal Gems,” she said.

Me, part of the Crystal Gems. It still hadn’t gotten old, thinking of that as an idea.

“Thanks.”

“Something’s on your mind,” Garnet observed, sitting down with crossed legs. “We could talk about it.”

“Uh, I’m not sure—” I frowned. “Actually, wait a second. You’re the perfect person to talk to about it.”

“I have a way of being around when I’m needed.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I grinned awkwardly. “I guess you do.”

Garnet smiled knowingly, and gestured for me to go on.

“Uh, well, I guess it’s something I’ve been thinking about since the car ride here. I was talking with my dad, and we were talking about some of my childhood memories. And the strangest thing happened—I nearly brought up this time we were out boating. I remember it pretty vividly, actually. We were off the coast of Beach City, and there was a guitar, and it was really pretty. Middle of spring, the water was super calm. But the thing was, it just…” I struggled to find the words. “It didn’t happen. Not to me, anyway.”

“Mmm.” Garnet nodded.

“‘Cause when I really think about it, really try to remember what it looked like, my dad was Mr. Universe. And  _ I _ was  _ Steven. _ So not only do I have it, but when I don’t think about it,  it really feels like it’s mine! I don’t know what to think about it.”

“That’s normal,” Garnet reassured me. “It may have been Stevonnie’s memory first, but it’s your memory, now.”

“Well, it was Steven’s memory before that! Am I like, stealing his memories or something?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head like that was enough. It wasn’t. I tilted my head at her, and she seemed to get the message.

“Think of it like this: even if you aren’t Stevonnie, Stevonnie is you. They have all the memories you do, and all the memories that Steven does. But then, remembering that thing is something that happened to you, too. So now you remember it even when you aren’t Stevonnie, because it’s something that you’ve done in your past.”

“Huh. Yeah, I guess. Thanks.” I checked on Steven. Still snoozing, though his neck was now at an awkward angle due to the way it was leaned against me. A twitch in his hand, another in his foot. Silently, he mouthed a word I couldn’t make out. Was he dreaming?

Was it a nightmare?

“You don’t sound particularly reassured,” Garnet said.

I sighed. 

“The thing is, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I mean, not by a long shot. Usually little stuff, what Steven had for lunch some day or whatever, or some kind of advice from his dad, or something like that.”

Garnet nodded.

“But you remember that first time we did fusion training? Er, the second day of it.”

“You did good,” she said.

“Yeah, well… when Steven was starting to fall out of it, I saw some things.” 

The room almost seemed to darken as the strongest of the visions returned to me. I remembered charging the Holo-Pearl fusion, and how in the instant before my lunge connected, the scene changed. There was molten rock all about me, one foot burning on the earthen floor. Shock filled my victim’s face as my blade struck deep. Horror crept into my heart—how could it be this easy to hurt someone, to fail someone? It should have been different. It should have been better. This was my fault.

I recalled it like Stevonnie had, like Steven must have. A dark cloud of thought, unavoidable and haunting. Something that loomed into being, called on or not, sometimes summoned by the dusk when the stars weren’t out yet. When the red hum of sunset almost looked to be the blood-orange glow of molten rock, deep inside the mountain.

“I saw something really important, something Steven was ashamed of. And that scares him. And hurts him.” 

“Bismuth.” Garnet made it more of a statement than a guess.

“Yeah. I just… I think he didn’t really want me to see that. Or anyone, really. But I ended up seeing it anyway. And I just wasn’t sure if that was right, you know? For fusion to, to take away his choice about that.”  

Garnet was quiet for a while before she responded.

“I think, that there  _ is _ something wrong about that. I think you’re right to notice that. But I don’t think that it’s fusion’s fault, and it definitely isn’t your fault. The blame is in here,” Garnet said, putting a finger to her temple, “On the memory itself. When an experience of truly hurts you, you don’t remember it because you choose to. You remember it because it invades you, because it becomes part of who you are. Steven didn’t choose that.”

She shook her head.

“Nobody would choose that. Steven’s choice to live without that memory was taken away from him. By Bismuth, and by Rose, and by all the random chance that led to it happening. It was a bad situation, bad for everyone involved. Steven… his choice to not relive that memory was stolen in the same way, by those same people. Maybe not out of malice, but that’s part of the tragedy of it.”

“Well, doesn’t that mean I’m still part of why it can’t be private to him?” Solemnly, I leaned my head back against the couch. “I’m part of all this, whether I like it or not.”

“Mmm. I suppose you are.” Garnet didn’t sound particularly committed to the statement. “In a way, though, that memory was already affecting your relationship. It’s changed who Steven is, just like anything we do changes ourselves. Through that, it’s changed you. That’s the same as the memory changing Stevonnie. Just, less literal.”

Steven’s arm began to move. Was he awake? I watched as his hand reached, grasped for something that wasn’t there. Eyes, still closed. Garnet gently touched his hand, guiding it gently back to rest on my leg. Steven gave a contented snore as he nestled against my side, pulling me slightly against him. I shared a smile with Garnet.

“If it's any consolation,” she quietly mused, “You seeing what happened there has probably done a lot more good than harm.”

I sighed, unconvinced.

“Steven carries himself differently around you. He trusts you in a way that… used to come a lot more easily to him.” Garnet smiled wistfully. “That you don’t carry secrets with each other, that you never even considered judging him for what happened, that’s a part of that.”

“You sure?”

“Talk with him about it. No need to hear it from me when you could have a conversation about it.” She waved her hand at me. “Hi, Steven. Love you.”

Huh? I replayed what she said in my head as I checked my hands, making sure that this wasn’t somehow another weird memory. Nope. Connie-hands. I called after her as she worked her way to her feet and started walking back to the temple door.

“Wait, what was that about?”

“For Steven,” she said with a grin. “When you think about it later, as Stevonnie.  _ Be _ the conversation. You won’t regret it.”

It clicked.

“Oh. Oh! Okay. Thanks, Garnet.”

“Anytime.” She gave me a little two-finger salute as the stone door slid shut behind her.

I rested my head back against the couch. I could rest my eyes for a bit, couldn’t I? Ah, but there was that lure of the waves, again. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep.


	4. Cold Dead Hands

_ -present- _

 

“Ow! Careful.” I winced, Pearl’s prodding bringing me back to reality. Same house, different time. Much different time. The waves weren’t restful anymore. Instead, they were roaring crashes at the edge of my world, intimately close in sound if still far in practice. I could barely catch the roiling bubbles of air caught beneath waves, hear vividly the skitter of small crabs moving in and out of the surf. 

Pearl rubbed at some spot she was having trouble with, the wet towel still managing to be irritatingly cold. Being dead, as it turned out, didn’t make being cold any less miserable. The only difference, I supposed, was that now I wasn’t going to catch a cold.

“I think I’m just about done, actually. Hmm. Yes, there we go.” She put the towel down on the floor by my chair. The one she had just finished using was only streaked with pink, but it joined another that had been completely soiled by my blood.

“How’s it look?” Amethyst leaned over from the loft above, where Steven’s bed was.

“There’s a prick on her neck…” Pearl’s fingers, delicate and cold, examined the spot I’d been bitten. “But it looks pretty old, and shallow, too. Other than that though, I can’t find any evidence she was hurt at all.”

That made sense. I was a vampire, so, I’d have accelerated healing. It wasn’t as quick or dramatic as when the Beast healed, though—did that have something to do with how long she’d been a vampire, or how much blood she’d consumed?

“It’s probably a bug bite,” I lied. “Horse flies are nasty business." 

I glanced up at her, and swiftly regretted it. Pearl’s eyes had a sharpness to them I was unaccustomed to. Suspicion wasn’t the right word, but there was a wariness to her that made me uncomfortable.

“I guess the blood’s not mine, then. I kinda lost track of everything… there was a lot going on.” I looked down with shame that I didn’t need to fake. “Can’t remember too well. It’s fuzzy.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

I shrugged.

“Sorry.  **Unless it was hers, I’m at a loss.** ”

**[[Need to make sure they trust us. Won’t have opportunities to act independently without trust.]]**

It wanted me to make the gems trust me? A hard sell, when I’d already texted them that the Beast had mind control powers. I didn’t think filling a few gaps into the story would help matters.

“You don’t think…” Amethyst nearly let the thought trail off. “Her parents?”

“I certainly hope not,” Pearl said with a grimace. “We’ll know more when Garnet gets back.”

I shook my head. 

“No, I remember what was happening pretty well until we left the house…” My story couldn’t be left at ‘no memory of what happened.’ It’d become too suspicious, too quickly. I needed to feed them truth in order to make them trust my lies. “I didn’t see my mom anywhere, but my dad was fine. Well, he wasn’t hurt, at least.”

Idly, I reached for my shirt, but Pearl snatched it away from me with judgemental eyes.

“You can’t wear this thing! It’s absolutely ruined! Amethyst, get her one of Steven’s.”

“Already on it,” Amethyst said, dropping down to check Steven’s… closet? It seemed more like a cupboard under the stairs, but it’s where all his clothes seemed to be. And then some. She tossed me a red shirt with a yellow star that was about my size. I muttered my thanks as I pulled the shirt on.

“My dad had been put under some kind of trance, by her,” I offered. “He couldn’t move.”

“Yeah?” Amethyst crossed her arms, leaning back against the stairway. “Was that what the deal with Steven was? She ‘trance’ you, too?”

“Amethyst!” Pearl hissed.

“What? We were gonna have to ask her some time, right?”

“Not now! We should at least wait for Garn—”

“It’s fine,” I said, neutrally. I knew the Parasite would prefer me to talk when Garnet wasn’t around. I mostly just wanted to talk  _ at all, _ so it worked out, in a way. “Something like that.”

“S’that all? You better now?” Amethyst asked, raising an eyebrow.

I furrowed my brow.With all my memories, the Parasite was at least as smart as I was—assuming anything otherwise would be reckless. It would think in the long term. And in the long term, lying was more likely to benefit  _ me _ , since catching me in a lie would make the Gems trust me less. Which meant that I would lose power over the Parasite by lying. Oh well. At least Steven was safe this way.

“…No. In fact, you should probably keep anyone from getting too close to me. Anyone human, that is.”

“A persistent effect,” Pearl muttered, in the direction of Amethyst. I probably would have heard it even without my enhanced hearing. “Like an order, or a rule.”

“Huh?” Amethyst didn’t make any attempt at all to keep her voice down. “How do you know?”

“I don’t,” Pearl replied. “It’s a hunch. If the mind-control used on her overrode Connie, we’d probably be able to tell that she wasn’t acting like herself. If the control used was based on proximity to this… lady, or some similar factor, she’d be free and would have told us about it by now. She wouldn’t be likely to cooperate at all if it rewrote her loyalties. Orders are a simple solution, and I know  _ intimately _ how possible that form of control is.”

“Hhwat-imately?”

“I’m a Pearl,” she replied with a finger towards herself, deadpan.

“Oh, right. That’s a thing. Yuck.” Amethyst looked back to me with a little concern in her eyes. “This is exhausting already. And a bit icky.”

“You don’t even know the half of it,” I said, laughing weakly.

Amethyst winced. “Right. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Got it. So… anything we should know?” 

There was something to be said for the most obvious plan—simply blurting out an important word or hint and hoping that the Parasite wouldn’t be able to react in time to stop me—but I didn’t like my odds. Even the very first time I tested the Parasite’s control, trying to cut the Beast, it had taken it less than half a second to re-exert its control after stopping me once. Even if I could say enough to make a difference, it’d strengthen the Parasite’s grasp of me in the process. I’d call that ‘Plan Z.’ My desperation move.

“I’ll tell you anything I can,” I said, smiling thinly.

“Right. So, we’re ready,” she said. “Dish.”

My smile got a little more awkward. “…I’ll tell you anything I  _ can _ .”

“Oh.” Amethyst wilted a little.

“It’s okay, Connie,” Pearl said, grabbing Amethyst’s shoulder. It looked more like it was for her own comfort than Amethyst’s, but they both got less tense afterward. “Just do your best. You’ll understand if we keep you here, for a while.”

“Yeah,” I said, dryly. “Makes sense.”

My voice wheezed a bit at the end—keeping track of your own breathing when it didn’t happen automatically was a lot harder than I’d expected. No wonder the Beast simply hadn’t bothered.

“Need anything? Some water?”

“Tea would be great,” I responded, instantly. “Or hot chocolate. I’m cold.”

So, so cold.

 

By the time Garnet got back, I was on the couch, immersed in a pile of blankets with a hot mug in my hands. The chamomile-mint tea had a complexity of flavor to it that I’d never noticed before, but it seemed… almost worse for it. Like it was missing something, or overcomplicated. Still, the heat I got out of it made me appreciate it more than any tea I’d ever had before. For similar reasons, the blankets were a disappointment—they didn’t make me any warmer, only prevented heat from escaping.

Garnet had surveyed the situation before the flash of the warp pad fully dissipated. In many ways, she was my greatest hope and my greatest danger.

“Things went well on this end, I presume.”

“As well as they could have,” Pearl replied. “You’re back late.”

“Helped the Maheswaran. He couldn’t talk, but he was able to write down what happened. Did some other things, too.”

“What about my mom?” I asked, voice hoarse.

“…Couldn’t find her.” Garnet admitted with a note of displeasure. “None of her coworkers have seen her today.”

“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking. Mom never missed work, so that would mean the Beast had started with her, in some fashion. With her dominating gaze, she could have started anytime in the last week if she was being careful enough. Commanded Mom to behave as if everything was normal, for instance. That seemed too careful, and too intricate, though. The Beast was brutal, ambitious, impulsive, and entitled. She’d have no patience to put a plan like that together. Gut instinct told me she’d have set this all in motion the night before at the very earliest.

Why would she do anything to my mother? For one, she might have been trying to avoid someone walking in at the last moment. Or if my mom came home early, she might have somehow wrinkled the Beast’s plans. That’s why I would go for my mom first, but I thought differently from the Beast. The Beast thought of things directly, transactionally. So that would mean she wanted my mom as additional leverage over me? A bit more savage, so probably closer to the mark… 

Or maybe she was just feeling peckish.

I shrunk further into my blankets. Definitely the worst night of my life.

“It’s not going to be much consolation, but I do have something for you.”

I glanced up to see Garnet holding out a cell phone. A nice one, not quite as good as my previous one, but still a smart-phone with a touch screen and everything.

“…Thanks?” I reached out to take it. It was warm. Just a little, though. “How’d you know mine was broken?”

“Lucky guess.”

“I mean, you stopped sending us messages while you were obviously in danger,” Amethyst said. “We figured something had happened to it, or to you, right?”

“Maybe a bit of both,” I quipped with a chuckle, rubbing my thumb against the phone’s side. Amethyst and Pearl visibly cringed, and awkward silence reigned for a few seconds.

“In any case,” Garnet said, breaking the silence, “Steven’s worried about you. He’d appreciate if you called him.”

I didn’t need to think about it for very long. I spent a few moments getting used to navigating it—not too hard considering it ran on the same OS as my previous phone—then went to the contacts to plug in Steven’s number, only to find it was already there. Along with Greg’s number and Pearl’s number (Pearl had a phone? Since when?).

I tapped on Steven’s number, and it rang one and a half times before he picked up.

“Connie?” He asked, immediately.

“Hey Steven,” I said, tired. My throat was dry, even though I’d been drinking plenty.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m as alright as I could be,” I said. “I wasn’t hurt, or anything.”

“It looked like—”

“I’m fine, Steven. Really. D-don’t come over, though. I’m… still not safe. For you.”

“…We’ll fix this Connie. I promise.”

I looked up at the Gems. Pearl was observing me, studiously and carefully. Amethyst’s eyes were keen and focused, watching out the window. Her hand idled near her gem, itching right next to it, but also ready to engage in combat in a second’s notice. Garnet stared off into the distance, more inscrutable than ever.

It was easy to forget, after all the time I’d spent with them, that the Crystal Gems had fundamentally crafted themselves around the possibility of war. It did not matter that their enemies here could be enumerated on a single hand—for them, the war had already begun. In a way, it was their way of telling me the same thing:

That they’d fix this, no matter what it took.

“I believe you, Steven.”

**[What if I was too far gone, though?]** The Parasite was harder to notice this time, but it had a point. It made me wonder, if this situation could really be fixed while my corpse could still stand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel a need to apologize to those I promised Connie would finally get a proper win here. Decided to split the chapter into two or three chapters just so that I could get stuff posted. Don't worry though, there's a good end to this story! ...eventually!


	5. Dead Air

I sat hunched beneath my miniature blanket-cave, fidgeting with the marble that the Beast had made me take. The blood inside it trended towards one side of the glass, even as I rotated it. Like a compass, I’d realized, pointing in the general direction of Ocean Town. Of home. And probably, also towards the Beast. That’s the main reason I could think of her being so desperate to get this to me during that fight.

“Well, what do you think?” I whispered hostilely. “You haven’t said anything for a while. What’s this for?”

**[[Obviously a beacon. Shows your way to Mother, shows Mother the way to me.]]**

I hadn’t thought of the possibility that it could guide the Beast to me—but it was a reasonable conclusion. So, it was doubly good that Steven wasn’t staying in the same place as I was.

Then again, if I stayed here too long, it wouldn’t be difficult for the Beast to figure out that I was in Beach City, and from there it could be childsplay for her to find Steven. Beach City was so small that I could probably hear every heartbeat in it from the center of town, without having to strain myself in the slightest. If the Beast was so much more powerful me in other aspects, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that her sense of hearing would be similarly more-developed.

Another time limit, then. I could count on at least a day of safety, as I doubted the Beast would leave the safety of Ocean Town before next dusk. Not worth getting caught out in the daylight—I had no way yet of knowing if sunlight was as dangerous to vampires as popularly depicted, but the way the Beast had drawn the curtains so tightly when she’d invaded my home was enough for me to feel confident that she didn’t find it pleasant.

I heard the barest hint of a foot against the floor, and immediately hid the marble back in my pocket. The gems were hard to hear, but still not impossible. Peeking out of my blankets, I saw Pearl looking down at me.

“Having trouble sleeping?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I croaked. I spent a second to clear my throat before following through. “Might not be able to sleep before the sun comes up. Any chance we could set me up somewhere to rest that’s in the dark? Maybe there’s somewhere in the Temple?”

“Letting you into the Temple seems like a pretty bad idea, I won’t lie,” Amethyst said from over near the window. “Lots of dangerous stuff in there, and for all we know…”

She was the most obviously on war-footing—Pearl had adopted some degree of bedside manner that made it harder to notice, and Garnet was as inscrutable as ever—Amethyst made no illusion that she was looking for intruders and near-hoping to fight them, though.

“We can set up a cot on the other side of the wall here,” Pearl mused, roaming over to the room with the warp pad. “We can set up a curtain across the rafter here, even.”

“That sounds great,” I said, nodding. Good to get that out of the way early, then. I’d hate to turn to dust or anything.

Well… maybe it wouldn’t be the worst if I did. It would make things considerably simpler for everyone else. But it was a moot point, since there was no way the Parasite would let me, anyway.

 

As I was helping Pearl to haul out the inflatable mattress they were planning to keep me on (could I even sleep anymore?), Garnet apparently made a decision and signaled me back over to the coffee table. After rummaging briefly in the closet, she produced a pen and a notepad, and set them down in front of me.

Amethyst looked over and raised an eyebrow at Garnet.

“Maheswaran-father couldn’t speak. Could write. Loopholes,” Garnet explained before looking back to me. “Maybe Connie can find some loopholes, too.”

“It’s worth a shot,” I mumbled trying to seem unhopeful as I picked up the pen.

In reality, I was next to giddy—this was my best shot at getting information through to the Crystal Gems. The Parasite was clever, at least as much as I was, but it didn’t seem to have any ability to actively read my own thoughts. After all, if it could read my mind, it wouldn’t have any difficulty passing its thoughts off as my own. I wouldn’t even know it was there.

Which left me a loophole, as Garnet suspected—though my path was far narrower and more fraught than my dad’s. If I could encode information in such a way that the Gems would understand it before the Parasite did, I could pass through some truly valuable hints. I needed to think of a cipher that would fool “me” for at least long enough to write it down, but that could eventually expose my situation.

I started by marking down a bullet point.

_ -Eventually wears off. _

Pearl leaned in, the activity having attracted her over from the other room.

“The control?” she asked.

I bit the inside of my lip—disconcertingly noticing my canines much more prominently than before—then nodded. It was misinformation, to be sure, but I needed to satisfy the Parasite while I was at it. Making them convinced that I’d come back to them if they kept me safe and isolated for long enough would keep them off of the Beast’s tail, and that certainly pleased the Parasite. I wrote down more, and Pearl said it aloud as I wrote.

_ -Reasonably sure. Not positive. _

_ -Indefinite seems unlikely. If so, why no thralls? _

“So what, you’re just guessing?” Amethyst asked. I thought a second before replying.

_ -Pretty much. _

“Ugh. What’s the point, then?” Amethyst groaned.

“We’re not just learning about what our enemy can or can’t do,” Pearl pointed out. “We’re learning about Connie, too. This lady, she must have said something along the lines of her not being able to talk about her weaknesses. Right?”

I paused a moment, then nodded.

“Something like that. I—” I put a hand over my mouth, as if in thought.

_ -Might become more powerful _

I felt my hand hesitate as I scratched that down. Was the Parasite noticing my hidden message, or just hesitant that I might reveal its waxing power over time? Couldn’t react to that—I needed to assume the latter.  **[Can’t give everything away. Just enough for trust. Just enough to get them to wait.]** If the Parasite was bothered enough to write down another line, my message would be garbled at best, potentially ruined.

_ when I cannot comply. _

I got a disturbing sense of comfort by finishing the line in that way. Was that her emotions coming through to my end, or was she—no,  _ it _ —was it pushing emotions onto me deliberately?

“That’s… uncomfortably effective,” Pearl grumbled into her hand, looking at me. “If you can, let me know where I’m wrong. You’re bound to some set of orders. The orders can’t last forever, but her compulsion to complete them becomes stronger when you can’t.”

I stayed silent. That was my story.

“Do you suspect the orders wear off over time?” she asked. “Or do you suspect they wear off as you adhere to them?”

_ -Afraid of the latter. Former seems more likely? _

“You could try watching my dad,” I croaked. My throat was so dry. “Might be able to figure it out that way.”

“I instructed the Maheswaran-father to hide until we resolve this matter,” Garnet said. “He’s too fragile for this.”

I huffed out a bit of laughter. She wasn’t wrong.

“Well, I guess we’ll figure it out one way or another,” I joked.

“Oh, Connie…” Pearl bent down on her knees to give me a hug. I hesitated a little before returning it.

“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

Maybe, if we took care of the Beast, I could live here with the gems. They didn’t have any blood, so I definitely couldn’t hurt them in a state of bloodlust, and they were strong enough that they could stop me from hurting anyone else, to boot. I squeezed Pearl harder at that little hope.

“Oof,” she grunted. “Little tight, Connie.”

“Oh!” I let go quickly. “S-sorry.” 

“Oh, don’t worry about it.”

Garnet made a quiet, contemplative noise. Everyone else in the house turned to look at her.

“What is it?” Amethyst asked.

“Probably nothing,” Garnet decided. “Connie, do you have anything else right now?”

One more thing, exactly. I put my thumb to my chin as I made sure it would work.

_ -Very impulsive, doesn’t plan much. _

Half-true, the most legitimately informing thing I’d managed to write down. It was somewhat misleading in that it might cause them to underestimate the Beast or to suspect she didn’t have any plans in motion—which is why I supposed the Parasite let me write it—but it still gave them legitimate character information.

“I’m not sure about that,” Pearl muttered. “Why would she take you away from home if she didn’t have any plan? Seems odd.”

I shrugged, underlining the word ‘impulsive.’

“She just did it because?” Amethyst half-chuckled. “I dunno, I do lots of things just ‘cause, and that still seems weird to me.”

She creased her brows in thought, and shuddered.

“Wow, we got real lucky finding you,” Amethyst said. “Who knows what would have happened if we couldn’t? That’s kinda freaky.”

“Maybe she would have taken me back to her lair, and turned me into some kind of monster,” I joked. It landed flat.

**[[Well,** **_I_ ** **thought it was funny.]]**

Oh, joy.

Taunt me though it might, I felt I was walking away from this with the better laugh. After all, the Parasite hadn’t noticed at all the coded message I’d hidden in my written conversation with the gems.

 

The night passed by without further incident. I waited until the barest red of dawn was visible on the horizon before ‘going to bed.’ I swaddled myself in the massive pile of blankets on the cot in the cave-room, behind the house, and I really honestly did try to get some sleep.

But sleep is something for the living. Instead, my eyes lay open and unblinking, staring at the darkness beneath the blankets. At the very least, I could convincingly fake sleep. Under nine layers of blankets, nobody can tell the difference between someone who’s asleep and someone who’s an actual corpse. And although I could no longer sleep, or dream, I could still find some semblance of distraction in memory… 

 

_ -a moment in the past- _

 

“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to fly?” I muttered aloud as I watched the gulls wheeling overhead. Then, I turned to my companion and felt very, very stupid. “Oh, well, no. Of course not.”

“Huh? What do you mean?” Steven said cheerfully.  ~~**His heart goes** **_fah-dum, fah-dum._ ** ~~ “It’d totally be cool, of course I’ve thought about it!”

“Wait, can’t you actually fly, though?”

“Not really! Just… jump well. Or, high, anyway. It’s more like I can turn off falling, than I can fly.”

“Isn’t that basically the same?” I set my head back in the sand. “You can still go into the air whenever you want, and just… stay there. If you want to go places, sure, you have to come down once and awhile, but who wants to fly to  _ get _ anywhere, right?”

Steven bit his lip as he thought about it.

“I kinda thought most people wanted to fly to get places.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s boring, though. Like, probably the most boring thing you could do with it. You get the power to fly, and you’re just going to use it to get places faster? You could go there anyway! You’ve got the important part of flying. The getting-really-high-in-the-sky part.”

“Hmm.” Steven hummed at that tone that said he disagreed with me.

“What is it?”

“I dunno. I just think… it’d be really fun to fly? Like, one time, Lapis took me flying, and that was fun. And another time, Pearl took me flying, and that was less fun. But it was still fun!”

“But it wasn’t fun because you were moving, right? It was fun because… like, all the things you can see. That’s what I like about taking airplanes.”

“No, the moving was a pretty important part of it,” Steven insisted. “It’s a little scary, in a good way. And when I think about, ‘what if I could fly, all by myself,’ you need to think about, like, the freedom. Being able to go anywhere you want, any  _ direction _ you want.”

“Hmm.”

“Here, how about this? I’ll take you floating, and see if you think it’s any different than, like, being on a plane.”

“Right now?”

“Sure!” Steven hopped up off his bed.  ~~**The bed creaks.** ~~  “There’s a pretty good view outside the Temple, and Garnet’s somewhere around, so it’s not like anything will go wrong.”

I groaned.

“That’s just  _ asking _ for something to go wrong.”

“It is?” He blinked. “But I just said that it probably wouldn’t.”

I paused, then snorted a bit. It was easy to forget that Steven was raised by aliens sometimes, but it was always funny.

“You’re right,” I chucked as I got up to turn off the TV we’d been watching. “Let’s give it a shot.”

 

The air was bitter-cold so high up. Even though I knew Steven wouldn’t let go, my heart still pounded and pounded as I looked out at the dizzying height, and I clung to Steven to stay steady. From here, I could see all of Beach City laid out below us, the people smaller than ants. In the distance, Ocean Town’s larger office buildings were little lumps on the horizon. The slopes of hills and trees looked almost painting-like in layout, like tiny brushstrokes rather than detailed objects.

“Oof. See?” Steven grinned as he gave a little mid-air spin. My stomach turned at the impossible motion, but I found myself laughing all the same, if holding him a little tighter to compensate.

“It’s fun, but not as fun as flying,” he claimed.

“T-this is nothing—” I interrupted myself with a fit of giggling. “This is  _ nothing _ like an airplane.”

“Right? It’s just—”

“It’s so. Much. Better.” I grinned as I dared to sit up a little to get a vantage point. He held me a bit tighter as a leaned up, and wobbled a bit as I saw the temple, tiny below us.

“I might barf, though,” I warned him. His beaming expression deflated quickly to horror.

“Don’t do that, please!”

“No promises,” I giggled, looking around. I caught sight of him pouting a bit, then laughed harder.

“Okay, okay! I’ll do my best.”

We drifted there, like another cloud in the sky, for too long to count.

 

_ -present- _

 

“You know, Connie probably missed dinner,” Pearl said from the main room. “And it’s nearly lunch-time. Do you think she’s hungry?”

**Yes. So,** so  **hungry.** But it wasn’t like she’d serve me what I wanted.

“Mm, probably. I dunno, I kinda just eat whenever I want.” Amethyst said, helpful as always.

“Very helpful, Amethyst,” Pearl said. “I guess I should make lunch.”

“Knock yourself out,” Amethyst said. “Just save some for me.”

“Connie’s only been asleep for a few hours, though… I guess I should wait?”

“Might not be asleep,” Amethyst figured. The floorboards near the window creaked—Amethyst standing up? “Hear, let me go check.”

“Amethyst!” Pearl hissed. “What if she  _ isn’t _ asleep? You’ll wake her up!”

“Aw, chill P, I’m good at this.” The floorboards creaking crept closer and closer to me, but I completely lost my ability to hear her after she got to the cave-portion of the house. 

“…Eh, she looks pretty asleep to me,” Amethyst admitted eventually, right next to me. “Can’t tell though, she’s buried under all these blankets.”

My uppermost blanket moved.

**[Life or death. Again.]**

I grabbed onto my blankets and curled them tight under me.

“Woah, sorry Connie,” Amethyst said. “You heard any of that, or did I wake you up?”

“Heard it,” I grated out. My voice wasn’t limber or ready, instead was raggedy and limp. I took a moment to take some breaths and a quick cough to clear my throat.

“Eesh. You okay?”

“Not really.”

“You want anything to eat?”

**Yes.**

“I  _ want _ to sleep,” I grumbled. Playing up my grouchiness would give me an excuse to feign sleep all the way to sunset. The short winter days meant that would be soon, which was both a blessing and a curse. My being free to move around safely was perhaps more a danger to the Gems than anything else… but I was becoming incredibly bored with the view of my sheets.

“…Right,” Amethyst let go of my blankets, and walked off.  **Crisis averted.**

 

I waited until the sounds of the seagulls flying above the water began to die out before finally daring to test—with just my pinkie finger—whether it was safe or not to get up. Walking to the window of the quiet house, I basked in the twilight glow of the sky after sunset, and it warmed me. Not from outside, but from the inside. I knew with certainty that the heat of the day would consume me, but by riding the edge, I could feel warm once again.

It was the first warmth I’d added to the world in nearly an entire day. For some reason, that made me want to cry again.


End file.
